Wendy Dabourne (2004) - Purpose and Cause in Pauline Exegesis (SNTSMS 104) Cambridge, UK, CUP.

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Three factors prompt this re-examination of the underlying questions that shape mainstream exegesis of Paul's letters. Hermeneutical studies have destabilized assumptions about the nature of
meaning in texts; the letters are usually characterized as pastoral
but explicated as expressions of Paul's thought; and the impact of
E. P. Sanders' work on Paul has sharpened exegetical problems in
Romans 1.164.25. The outcome is a two-step method of exegesis
that considers a letter rst in the light of the author's purpose in
creating it and second as evidence for the patterns of thought from
which it sprang. The passage appears as pastoral preaching, helping
the Romans to deal with the implications of the fact that the God
of Israel is now accepting believing Gentiles on the same basis as
believing Jews. Justication by grace through faith emerges as the
theological understanding of God's action in Christ that grounds
the pastoral speech.
SOCIETY FOR NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES

MONOGRAPH SERIES
General editor: Richard Bauckham
104
PURPOSE AND CAUSE IN PAULINE EXEGESIS
Purpose and Cause in

Pauline Exegesis
Romans 1.164.25 and
a New Approach to the Letters
WENDY DABOURNE

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcn 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa
http://www.cambridge.org
Wendy Dabourne 2004
First published in printed format 1999
ISBN 0-511-03608-6 eBook (Adobe Reader)
ISBN 0-521-64003-2 hardback
CONTENTS
Preface
List of abbreviations
page ix
x
Asking new exegetical questions
Exegesis of Romans 1.164.25: the basic conception

and its problems
Romans 1.164.25: what do we want to know?
20
The basis for separating presuppositions from

intended address
34
How to trace what Paul was intending to say to

the Romans
44
Working from the problems of interpretation within

the justication framework
47
Paul's purpose in creating the text
63
The nature of the text
76
Hypothesis describing Romans 1.164.25
109
10
The teleological exposition of Romans 1.164.25
115
11
Testing the teleological reading
171
12
The causal exposition of Romans 1.164.25
182
13
Review and conclusion
208
Select bibliography
Index of biblical and other ancient sources
General index
231
249
256
vii
PREFACE
This book is one outcome of many years' work, and it is a joy

to acknowledge the contributions of a wide circle of teachers,
colleagues, students and friends. In particular, Dr John Ziesler,
Rev. Toska Williams, Rev. Dr Gordon Watson, Rev. Dr Robin
Boyd, Prof. Colin Gunton and the unknown SNTS referee read the
entire typescript at various stages of its development and offered
encouragement and helpful comments. Special contributions have
been made by Mr Sean Jackson, Dr Neil Williams, Ms Wendy
Butterworth, the Community at Oxley House and a generous group
of friends who checked my typing.
The early stages of the research were undertaken during my
Ph.D. studies at Cambridge. Rev. John Sweet, Rev. Dr (now
Professor) Christopher Rowland, Dr John Ziesler and, especially,
my supervisor Professor Morna Hooker, offered stimulus, challenge and encouragement. Thanks are due to Trinity College for its
Research Studentship in Theology and many other benets and
pleasures, to the British Department of Education and Science for
an Overseas Research Student's Award, and to Ormond College in
the University of Melbourne for a travel grant.
I wish to thank SNTSMS editors Dr Margaret Thrall and
Professor Richard Bauckham for their work, and staff of Cambridge
University Press for their expertise and helpfulness.
ix
ABBREVIATIONS
AB
AnBib
ANRW
BAGD
BDF
BFT
BJRL
BNTC
CBQ
EBib
EKKNT
ExpTim
FFNT
FRLANT
GNS
GRBS
HTKNT
HTR
IB
IBS
ICC
IDB
IDBSup
Int
x
Anchor Bible
Analecta Biblica
Aufstieg und Niedergang der Romischen Welt
W. Bauer, W. F. Arndt, F. W. Gingrich and F. W.
Danker, GreekEnglish Lexicon of the New Testament
F. Blass, A. Debrunner and R. Funk, A Greek
Grammar of the New Testament
Biblical Foundations in Theology
Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of
Manchester
Black's New Testament Commentaries
Catholic Biblical Quarterly
Etudes bibliques
Evangelisch-katholischer Kommentar zum Neuen
Testament
Expository Times
Foundations and Facets: New Testament
Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und
Neuen Testaments
Good News Studies
Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies
Herders theologischer Kommentar zum Neuen
Testament
Harvard Theological Review
Interpreter's Bible
Irish Biblical Studies
International Critical Commentary
G. A. Buttrick (ed.), Interpreter's Dictionary of the
Bible
Supplementary volume to IDB
Interpretation
List of abbreviations
JBC
JBL
JSNT
JSNTSup
JSOTSup
LCL
LEC
MNTC
NCB
Neot
NIGTC
NovT
NovTSup
NTD
NTS
RB
RNT
RSV
SBLDS
SBLSBS
SBT
SD
SJLA
SJT
SNTSMS
SNTW
SO
ST
TDNT
TLZ
TZ
WBC
WUNT
ZNW
ZTK
xi
R. E. Brown et al. (eds.), The Jerome Biblical

Commentary
Journal of Biblical Literature
Journal for the Study of the New Testament
Journal for the Study of the New Testament
Supplement Series
Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
Supplement Series
Loeb Classical Library
Library of Early Christianity
Moffat New Testament Commentary
New Century Bible
Neotestamentica
New International Greek Testament Commentary
Novum Testamentum
Novum Testamentum, Supplements
Das Neue Testament Deutsch
New Testament Studies
Revue biblique
Regensburger Neues Testament
Revised Standard Version
SBL Dissertation Series
SBL Sources for Biblical Study
Studies in Biblical Theology
Studies and Documents
Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity
Scottish Journal of Theology
Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series
Studies of the New Testament and its World
Symbolae Osloenses
Studia Theologica
G. Kittel and G. Friedrich (eds.), Theological
Dictionary of the New Testament
Theologische Literaturzeitung
Theologische Zeitschrift
Word Biblical Commentary
Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen
Testament
Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft
Zeitschrift fur Theologie und Kirche
1
A S K I N G N E W E X EG E T I C A L Q U E ST I O N S
The work reported in this study of Rom. 1.164.25 springs from

two main issues. The rst is the church's present alienation from
the Bible, a widespread concern shared by many Christian NT
scholars and affecting NT studies most obviously in hermeneutical
questioning and experiment. The second is a concern that mainstream historical-critical study fails to take with full seriousness its
own dictum that Paul's letters are letters and pastoral and must be
treated as such. Many colleagues will consider this concern unnecessary, but if it is justied it means that the picture of Paul, his
activity and his thought which emerges from mainstream scholarship is suffering signicant distortion.
The starting point of the study is a confessional statement about
scripture, using the language of our post-Enlightenment culture but
in contrast with its secularity:
The Uniting Church acknowledges that the Church has
received the books of the Old and New Testaments as
unique prophetic and apostolic testimony, in which she
hears the Word of God and by which her faith and
obedience are nourished and regulated . . . The Word of
God on whom man's [sic] salvation depends is to be heard
and known from Scripture appropriated in the worshipping and witnessing life of the Church.1
Engaging as scholar and minister with the problem of alienation
from the Bible has led me to conclude that it is not the fault of
biblical scholars or of the historical-critical method, although both
are often blamed. Nor is it the Bible's fault, although the strangeness of documents that belong to cultures distant from us in time
and space is often blamed. Differences of cosmology are a classic
1
Uniting Church in Australia, Basis of Union, par. 5.
Purpose and cause in Pauline exegesis
example, and such problems are not trivial. Beside the real barrier,
however, they seem small. In the world of the Bible, God is the
Creator and God's purpose is being worked out. God is the
measure of truth and justice. In present-day Western culture, God
is a private option, an hypothesis that some people accept. The
problem of the church's alienation from the Bible lies with the
church. The church is too well embedded in the secular culture.
This includes biblical scholars who own themselves and their work
as part of the church, the body of Christ. Thus, the problem is an
aspect of the struggle to be the church in the secular world, and
there are no easy answers.
How, under God, can the church tackle the problem of alienation
from the Bible? This would require another book. For our study,
Newbigin offers a helpful statement:
[W]e get a picture of the Christian life as one in which we
live in the biblical story as part of the community whose
story it is, nd in the story the clues to knowing God as his
character becomes manifest in the story, and from within
that indwelling try to understand and cope with the events
of our time and the world about us and so carry the story
forward. At the heart of the story, as the key to the whole,
is the incarnation of the Word, the life, ministry, death,
and resurrection of Jesus. In the Fourth Gospel Jesus
denes for his disciples what is to be their relation to him.
They are to `dwell in' him. He is not to be the object of
their observation, but the body of which they are a part.
As they ìndwell' him in his body, they will both be led into
fuller and fuller apprehension of the truth and also become
the means through which God's will is done in the life of
the world.2
This shows how radical is the action needed. Of course, the church
is already indwelling the biblical story by its very existence as a
confessing, worshipping, caring people of God. Nevertheless, there
is a need to know the story better and to become more at home in
it, because Christians are socialized and educated into the conicting world of our secular culture. What is the role of Christian
NT scholars in this undertaking?
The confessional statement offers the afrmation that `[the]
2
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 99.
Word of God on whom man's salvation depends is to be heard and

known from scripture appropriated in the . . . life of the Church'.
The scripture is described as `the books of the Old and New
Testaments [received] as unique prophetic and apostolic testimony
in which [the church] hears the Word of God and by which her
faith and obedience are nourished and regulated'. In this relationship, the church can grow towards living more fully ìn the biblical
story'.
If Scripture is to be thus appropriated, Christians must rst listen
to the ùnique prophetic and apostolic testimony'. It is not a matter
of wresting relevance from recalcitrant texts, and approaching
Scripture in that spirit is likely to get in the way of hearing the
Word of God.3 The apostolic testimony participates in the historical particularity of the incarnation. The church needs to listen to it,
simply to be open to it on its own terms. This is the beginning, not
the end, of the process of appropriation. The Christian NT scholar
can be an enabler of that listening.
This role denition brings us to the concern of historical-critical
scholarship with understanding the text as John's, or Mark's, or
Paul's. It demands knowledge of the language of the texts and of
their historical, cultural and church contexts. It demands the
discipline of being aware of our own presuppositions and circumstances, so that we guard against blurring the distinctive testimony
of the writers with personal concerns and emphases. It follows the
Enlightenment insistence that the texts are not unmediated revelation or pure theology, but human documents which must be treated
accordingly in Paul's case, as letters, as pastoral, and as Paul's.
Further, this role denition can give a purpose and a shape to
Christians' practice of historical-critical scholarship. The work is
not done simply for the fascination of the chase, but in the service
of the church's task of listening. It gives a measure of which
questions are most important.
New Testament Studies exists as a discipline in the secular
university, and is widely seen to have its integrity as a secular
discipline into which the church must not intrude. On the other
hand, the documents are scripture NT only in the context of the
church's life, and the church needs independent-minded biblical
scholarship, not at the service of immediate issues or of the church's
power structures, but an activity of the body of Christ.
3
With Stendahl, Final Account, 21.
This study examines Rom. 1.164.25. It is a scholarly study,

offering to NT scholarship an alternative way of practising historical-critical exegesis on Paul's letters, and an alternative understanding of this important passage. It is also part of the scholarly
work of enabling the church in its task of listening to Paul's
apostolic testimony. It is not intended to provide the preacher with
sermon material, but so to open up the text that believers may be
helped to grapple with Romans and come to know it as part of
their own life, part of their participation in the biblical story.
Listening to Paul's apostolic testimony sets us the same task of
explicating the text as Paul's that is undertaken in mainstream
historical-critical study. Here we encounter the concern that historical-critical scholarship is failing in its endeavour to take Paul's
letters seriously as letters and as pastoral. The study opens up these
issues, and a new approach to the text is developed. We are not
rejecting the historical-critical method, but modifying the way it is
usually practised on Paul's letters, especially by developing new or
sharpened exegetical questions.
Questions are the most important tool of exegetes. Their skills
and knowledge in the areas of the language and culture of the NT
and the language and culture of biblical scholarship enable them to
use the tools effectively. The basic exegetical tool is the question,
What does this text mean? It is shattering to realize that exegetical
experiment and hermeneutical study over several decades have
broken it. The concept `the meaning of the text' has been relativized. Is the meaning what the writer intended to say? Does
meaning inhere in the structures of the text itself, independently of
the writer's intention? Does meaning arise in the encounter between
text and reader? A text like Romans yields meaning through readings based on any of these assumptions. When we consider short
sections, a greater range is likely to open up. By what criteria can
we decide what constitutes `the meaning of the text'? If we cannot
establish criteria, does the text offer an apparently innite range of
meaning, all of which is at our disposal?
This disabling of the question seems to paralyse us. We advance
by recognizing that the blanket question corresponds poorly with
actual practice. A text is a series of conventional marks on a
sufciently smooth surface. All our language about its meaning is
metaphor. In reading texts in general we conceive the meaning in
different ways, depending on the nature of the text and what we
want to do with it. A comparison of poetry and instruction
manuals makes this obvious. If we nd some Sumerian prayers, we

feel fairly condent that their meaning for us as historical sources is
different from their meaning for the Sumerians who prayed them.
Thus, the fact that we are no longer sure how to go about
answering the blanket question, What does Romans mean? forces
our attention onto ourselves as readers. What kind of a text are we
reading? Romans is a letter written as part of Paul's ministry and of
the continuing life of the church of the fties, with no thought that
it would come to be scripture. What do we want to do with it? NT
scholarship wants to listen to it as Paul's; the church wants to listen
to it as part of Paul's apostolic testimony.
In both cases, we must take it very seriously as Paul's. This will
move us into the world where God is not a private option, as far as
we can be so moved. We must look at Paul's intention. He was
writing a letter to the believers in Rome. Our rst question, then, is,
What was Paul intending to say to the Romans? This will not
exhaust the meaning of the text as Paul's. We want to learn from it
about Paul's understanding of the gospel, about Paul as a pastor
and as a person. The NT scholar's wider task includes using
Romans as a source for understanding the church and the world in
which Paul wrote, but this limited study offers only an indirect
contribution to that work.
We asked what kind of text we are reading and what we want to
do with it. Our answers show that the model of meaning applicable
here is meaning conceived as contained in the text and in some
sense governed by the author's intention. Authorial intention is
normally given considerable weight in considering the meaning of a
letter. For scripture, this is much more debated. The moves we have
made do not, of course, constitute any general answer to the puzzle
about the meaning of meaning.
The study of Rom. 1.164.25 presented in chapters 212 has two
aims: to make a substantial contribution to the understanding of
the passage as Paul's, and to use it as a test case for developing a
new historical-critical approach to Paul's letters. We shall consider
carefully their character as letters and as pastoral, and the consequences of the breakdown of the question, What does this text
mean? The aims are complementary, and they create interactive
elements in the study. Chapter 13 is a review, considering particularly the wider application of the work.
We begin by examining the problems the passage raises.
2
EXEGESIS OF ROMANS 1.16 4.25: THE
B A S I C C O N C E P T I O N A N D I T S P R O B LE M S
Working in mainstream NT scholarship, we approach texts with

existing conceptions, conscious and unconscious, of them and of
our task as exegetes. Approaching a Pauline letter, we know who
Paul was and what this letter is about. The debate provides this
basic conception, a framework within which we formulate our
questions and wrestle with the problems the text poses.
The basic conception of Rom. 1.164.25 is that it is Paul's
account of the way God justies people. Rom. 1.1617 is the theme
statement for this account and/or for Romans. Rom. 1.183.20
presents the human predicament, that all are sinners. Rom. 3.216
announces God's solution, justication for all who believe through
God's gracious action in the Cross. Rom. 3.2731 spells out some
consequences. Romans 4 deals with Abraham's faith. This account
may be seen as a presentation of the gospel or of the doctrine of
justication, as didactic or polemical. Paul used the language of his
time and place, so to understand it we must work to cross the
culture gap, study Paul's terms, and recognize the critical importance of the JewGentile distinction. We shall refer to this basic
conception as the justication account or justication framework.
Scholars' acquaintance with the problems of the text enriches the
basic conception. There are major problems, such as the role of the
law, and apparent inconsistencies, such as the appearance of lawkeeping Gentiles in an argument that all have sinned. There are
problems of detail. Is o" krinvn in Rom. 2.15 the Jew or any selfrighteous person? Rom. 3.9a; 4.1 present particularly difcult textcritical problems. Some problems arise from lack of information.
For instance, we lack sufcient context in contemporary literature
to understand fully i" lasthrion (Rom. 3.25a).
The basic conception thus enriched constitutes the common
ground of the scholarly debate on Rom. 1.164.25. It allows for
many styles and emphases in interpretation, and vigorous argument
6
The basic conception and its problems
about what Paul thought and meant. New exegeses are judged by
their scholarly competence, ability to cast new light on some of the
problems, and theological substance. Within this framework, the
debate proceeds on the assumption that we know what the text is
about and are seeking solutions to the problems.
In current exegesis, there are two kinds of challenge to the basic
conception. There are suggestions that Rom. 1.164.25 is not a
justication account. For instance, Minear presents Rom.
1.184.15 as part of Paul's theological grounding for his critically
important assertion, pan de o^ oy!k e!k pistevq a"martia e!stin (Rom.
14.23). It is addressed to one of ve groups Minear identies in
Rome, showing the equality of all who are sinners justied by
grace.1 For Elliott, Rom. 1.164.25 is concerned primarily with
God's sovereignty, integrity and freedom. In particular, the accountability of all people to God is presented to Gentiles, using the
Jew as a paradigmatic case.2 Watson presents a sociological
reading, with Romans 111 an address to Jewish Christians,
mainly to convert them to Paul's view of the law so that the Roman
churches may be united as a Pauline Gentile church.3 Although
such interpretations have attracted considerable interest, none has
accounted for the text better than readings within the basic conception, so they have not displaced it.
In 1977, Sanders published Paul and Palestinian Judaism. This
convinced the majority of NT scholars that in the Judaism of Paul's
period the law did not function as a means of earning one's own
justication. This has led to reconsideration of the role of the law in
Rom. 1.164.25, since Paul had been seen as arguing against
justication by works. It has also given impetus to the recognition
of the importance of practical questions about JewGentile relationships in the rst-century church. Dunn's Romans and Ziesler's
Paul's Letter to the Romans presented the rst attempts to produce
whole readings of Romans that take account of Sanders' work.
Both accept the basic conception in Rom. 1.164.25, and we can
see that dealing with the new questions strains it.
Neither commentator takes Rom. 1.164.25 as the rst major
section. Within the traditional pattern of analyses of structure,
Dunn sees Rom. 1.185.21 as the rst major section of the letter
body, with Romans 5 setting out rst conclusions from the
1
2
3
The Obedience of Faith, chs. 2 and, esp., 3.

The Rhetoric of Romans, ch. 2 and excursus.
Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles, chs. 57.
presentation of God's saving righteousness to faith, and Rom.

1.1617 as the climax of the introduction and the theme for what
follows.4 Ziesler breaks with the tradition. Rom. 1.1617 is the
transition to and opening of the letter body, then the human
predicament and God's solution are presented in Rom. 1.183.31,
but Rom. 4.18.39 is a complex unit developing four main aspects
of this solution. The rst is presented in Rom. 4.15.21.5 These
differences reect two problems for exegesis within the basic
conception. Does the section end at Rom. 4.25, 5.11 or 5.21? What
is the function of Romans 4? In line with tradition, both of these
readings stress Abraham's justication by faith as showing the
continuity between the gospel and God's action with Israel, but
they stress more strongly the issue of Jew and Gentile together
within the people of God.
Both scholars explicate Rom. 1.1617 as presenting the message
of justication by faith. Each sows a seed of the element which will
strain the framework provided by the basic conception. For Dunn,
! IoydaiCv te prvton kai % Ellhni is programmatic for the letter,
bringing the JewGentile issue into sharp focus, here as a reminder
to Gentiles that Jewish prerogative and Gentile outreach are
together important to the gospel.6 Ziesler's special emphasis is on
God's faithfulness bringing about a people of God which includes
all who are willing to receive. As they move through the text, the
impact of the questions raised by Sanders' work is very visible.
Ziesler argues that Paul's target is not human self-righteousness,
especially Jewish,7 and he sees his attention directed to questions
about the new people of God created by God's new action. This
questions contemporary Jewish self-understanding and demands a
new interpretation of Israel's election. Ziesler's understanding of
righteousness in Paul makes a distinctive contribution, but the Jew
Gentile question strains the basic conception. Dunn sees the
important secondary theme of the law raising many of the most
difcult problems of understanding Romans. Using a sociological
perspective, he expounds Paul's treatment of problems raised by a
Jewish misunderstanding of the law as a boundary marker, dening
the realm of election and thus of privilege.8 In his reading, this
4
5
6
7
8
Romans, viiviii, 38.

Romans, 356.
Romans, 47.
Romans, 12.
Romans, lxvi, lxxi.
strains the basic conception, which nevertheless denes the structure and themes of the passage.
Ziesler concludes that in Rom. 1.183.20 Paul is trying to prove
not that every individual is grossly and helplessly sinful, but that
Jews as much as Gentiles are sinners and answerable to God. This
makes the detail of the text more manageable. Finally, however, the
argument has provided the basis of justication by grace
`humanity as a whole, Jew and Greek, is in need of liberation'.9
Ziesler is too honest to gloss over the inadequacy of Paul's
argument, and his exegesis shows the strain this inadequacy
creates.10 The same tension between the basic conception and the
interpretation of detail runs in Dunn's exegesis of the passage. He
takes for granted the need to demonstrate that all have sinned,
speaking of a universal indictment with a major element of attack
on Jewish self-assurance. Rom. 3.920 is a summing up of the
universal indictment.11 In his Explanation, however, it appears far
more as the nal demonstration that Jews also stand under the
condemnation they passed on Gentiles in Rom. 1.1832.12 Nevertheless, the basic conception is obviously shaping Dunn's thinking.
His Explanation of Rom. 3.22c23 pictures Paul explaining universal sin to Jews who think that they are an exception.13
Dunn treats Rom. 3.2131 as one unit with two sub-sections, the
announcement of justication and some consequences for Jewish
self-understanding. His exposition shows a continuation of the
pattern of his treatment of Rom. 1.183.20. Rom. 3.216 is an
account of justication, but Paul has concentrated on the one
controversial element, justication for all on the basis of faith.
Dunn treats the passage as exposition, but also as though it were
addressed to Jews who thought that they ought to be an exception,
thereby achieving a close link with Rom. 3.2731. Similarly, the
pattern of Ziesler's exposition continues. He treats the passage as
one unit. In his exegesis of Rom. 3.216 as an account of justication, he constantly makes explicit the implication of what Paul is
saying, that Jews are no different from Gentiles in this matter. In
this context, Rom. 3.27 says that Jews have no boast over against
Gentiles not that they have no boast before God.
9
10
11
12
13
Romans, 100.
Ibid., e.g. 100, 10910 on Rom. 3.23.
Romans, 51.
Ibid., 156.
Ibid., 178.
10
Neither Dunn nor Ziesler has explicitly questioned the basic

conception, but both exegeses show Rom. 1.164.25 as a justication account heavily inuenced by the JewGentile questions. This
shows more clearly in Ziesler's book because his readership needs
to be introduced to the scholarly conception. Dunn assumes
familiarity with it. One result is that his exposition reads as though
Paul was addressing Jews, although he concludes that Romans is
addressed to Gentiles.14
In The Reasons for Romans, Wedderburn outlines a reading of
Rom. 1.164.25.15 Rom. 1.1618 presents three thematic statements. Rom. 1.193.20 develops the theme of the revelation of
God's wrath and also is an argument that all, including the Jews
who thought that they were privileged, stand guilty before God.
Rom. 3.216 describes how God's righteousness is available to all
through grace. This saving righteousness is exercised through a
judgement of condemnation. God has replaced law with faith, for
Jew and Gentile alike (Rom. 3.2730). This establishes the law,
which attests the principle of justication by faith in the critical
case of Abraham (Rom. 3.304.25). This is the rst stage of the
argument of Romans 111, in which Paul is defending his gospel
against charges of unrighteousness. This includes a question of
God's own righteousness or unrighteousness.16 It seems likely that
if this reading were presented on the same scale as Dunn's
commentary, it also would look like a justication account for
Jews, but with a strong reference to the question of God's righteousness.
We may say, then, that current challenges have not displaced the
basic conception of Rom. 1.164.25 as a justication account,
although developments in understanding of the law, particularly,
have strained it considerably.
This study starts with the recognition of discrepancies between
the basic conception and Paul's text that are so serious as to
demand that it be directly questioned. They pose problems which
cannot be solved within it. This means not that we have been
unable to solve them with present knowledge or methods, but that
they can be shown to be incapable of solution. Either we are
making a mistake or Paul was. There are three of these discrepancies.
14
15
16
Romans, xlv.
Reasons, 12330.
Ibid., 11214.
11
The rst is between the goal of the argument in Rom. 1.183.20

and the content of Paul's text. If Rom. 3.216 is Paul's announcement of the revelation of the righteousness of God as the answer to
the human predicament, then Rom. 1.183.20 must be presenting
that predicament. If Paul was trying to do that, he has not made his
case. The many recent articles on Rom. 1.183.20 and on sections
of it show that this argument is a concern in mainstream scholarship.
There are two critical problems. First, there is no proof that all
have sinned. It is a commonplace of exegesis that the condemnation
of Gentile and Jewish sins is not a conclusion drawn from observation and could not be true of everybody. Rom. 3.920 can be taken
as proving universal sinfulness by the authority of scripture, cited
in the catena, but this involves accepting that Paul places Gentiles
with Jews e!n tCv nomCv (Rom. 3.19). Some exegetes do this,17 but in
the context of an argument proving the sinfulness of Jews and
Gentiles, we should expect that toiq e!n tCv nomCv would be taken as
referring to Jews unless there were some clear indication to the
contrary, and Paul gives none. We could soften the requirement of
proof. Bruce, for instance, suggests that Paul does demonstrate the
sinfulness of the Jewish and Gentile worlds.18 Certainly Paul did
not think as individualistically as we do, but panteq . . . h%marton
(Rom. 3.23) is part of the basis for justication for pantaq toyq
pisteyontaq (Rom. 3.22c). In the fties, no-one could see whole
races as believing. The argument must be taking the individual
seriously. Another way of softening the requirement of proof is to
suggest that the statements are meant to work in some other way.
Kasemann calls them prophetic and apocalyptic denunciations;19
Wilckens suggests that Paul is working with motifs and themes
from Jewish polemic against the Gentile world (Rom. 1.1832) and
from a JewChristian conict (Romans 2).20 Such proposals imply
that Paul was not simply arguing rationally, but aimed to convince
his hearers partly by appeals to emotion. Nevertheless, too many
Gentiles and Jews could feel with good reason that this very black
picture did not apply to them.
17
e.g. Bornkamm, Paul, 1212; Sanders, Paul, the Law and the Jewish People,
p. 82 and n. 45. Gaston (Paul and the Torah, 2931) includes this verse in his
argument for y"po nomon as a technical term referring to Gentiles, but the close
parallel with Rom. 2.12 rules this out.
18
The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, 77, 87.
19
Commentary on Romans, 40, 69.
20
Der Brief an die Romer, I, 116, 1501.
12
The second major difculty with the content of the argument is

the appearance of law-keeping Gentiles (Rom. 2.14, 267). This
might help to convince Jews that they are not better than Gentiles,
but it is inconsistent with the condemnation of the Gentile world
(or the whole world) in Rom. 1.1832, and introduces the possibility that there are, or might be, some people who did not need
grace. The only explanation that saves consistency here is that these
are Gentile Christians,21 but it cannot stand against modern
recognition of the importance of the JewGentile issue in Romans.
Christian Jews, also, would put other Jews to shame. Further, the
Jews' problem with Paul's Gentile churches was that the law was
not observed, however much Paul might claim that it was fullled.
If Paul's aim was to bring his audience to Rom. 3.20 accepting
that the human race as a whole, or every person, has sinned and
needs rescue from God's condemnation, then he must be judged to
have failed. No new research can make inconsistency consistent or
turn such overstated denunciation into convincing rhetoric, let
alone proof. This forces us to a challenging conclusion. Either Paul
failed with one of the most important arguments in his extant
correspondence or he was not trying to prove that all have sinned.
If the former is true, the mistake is Paul's; if the latter is true, it is
ours.
We come to the second very serious discrepancy between Paul's
text and the basic conception. For an introductory justication
account, the passage is extraordinarily out of balance. The core
teaching gets 6.3 per cent of the text (Rom. 3.216) plus an
introductory summary, 2.6 per cent of the text (Rom. 1.1617), a
total of 8.9 per cent.22 This covers six elements: justication for all
who believe, the fact that faith is faith in Christ, the way God
justies through the Cross, a statement about God's own righteousness, a summary statement of universal sin, and a claim to
scripture support for the thesis. In contrast, the proof that all have
sinned takes 62.5 per cent of the account (Rom. 1.183.20), while
the faithboasting contrast and the discussion of Abraham together
occupy 28.6 per cent. That is, Paul introduces the good news of
justication by faith to the Romans he has never seen by giving
them a scanty introduction, spending almost two-thirds of his time
on sin, presenting a cryptic account of justication, and then
21
e.g. K. Barth, A Shorter Commentary on Romans, 357.

Percentages in this paragraph were calculated on the basis of a line count of the
NestleAland 26th/27th edn text, and rounded to one decimal place.
22
13
expounding at length the nature and implications of faith and the

history of Israel.
Of course it would be wrong to assume that the proportion of the
account spent on any one element should be in direct proportion to
its importance. Some things are harder to explain than others. If
Jews are harder to convince that they are sinners because of their
special gifts from God, then extra time needs to be spent on that.
Nevertheless, the content of a message would normally impose
some of the proportions of an account of it. In this case, the fact
that it has not done so means that the central element, the actual
account of justication, is too brief to be clear. It is abundantly
clear that the human response required is faith, and that God acts
graciously. The explanation of how this comes about through the
Cross is cryptic. It cannot pass muster as an introduction for
beginners, especially beginners who may be suspicious of the
author. This represents a marked tension between Paul's text and
the basic conception. Is the mistake Paul's, or ours? Has he created
a text that does not say adequately what he intended to say, or have
we been working with a wrong idea of his intention?
The third very serious discrepancy between Paul's text and the
basic conception is that Rom. 3.216 does not work as an
introductory announcement of justication. As well as being too
compressed, it is also out of balance. Further, the meaning does not
match the grammar.
The elements of the account in Rom. 3.216 are: justication for
all who believe, faith is faith in Christ, all have sinned, they are
being justied freely by God's grace, justication is through God's
action taken in the Cross, God's own righteousness is shown in that
action. There are ninety-nine words in the passage. The announcement of righteousness through faith and the fact that this is faith in
Jesus Christ take up the rst twenty-ve (Rom. 3.212c). This
element is important and the proportion of the explanation spent
on it reects Paul's particular context, where the relationship with
the law is important. It takes 25.3 per cent of the text, and is
reinforced by references to faith in Rom. 3.25a, 26. The reminder of
the human plight, all have sinned, takes thirteen words (Rom.
3.22d23), and there is a ve-word announcement of gracious
justication (Rom. 3.24a). This, the central statement of the
justication account, that people are sinners justied by God's
grace, occupies altogether 18.2 per cent of the statement, and only
just over one-quarter of that is on the positive side. The explanation
14
of the Atonement on which it all depends takes nineteen words,

19.2 per cent of the text, and is extremely cryptic. The nouns
a!polytrvsiq, i" lasthrion, ai_ma are dumped down in rapid succession, with no serious attempt at explanation (Rom. 3.24b25a).
Surely Paul could either have explained clearly or not explained
until later. What is clear is that this is action of God's grace,
seeking the response of faith. In a justication account the statement about God's own righteousness is a supporting element, not
the main point. In some readings it is very important the gospel is
salvation for believers because God's righteousness is revealed in it.
Nevertheless, the driving question of a justication account is not,
How is God (seen to be) righteous? but, How can sinners be
righteous before God? The statement about God's own righteousness is either a guard clause, showing that God takes sin seriously
and does not simply call black white,23 or an explanation of how
the revelation of the righteousness of God is also, or includes, a
revelation of God's own righteousness.24 Yet this element occupies
37.4 per cent of Paul's text, including the nal reference to faith. A
reader unaware of the basic conception would be justied, it seems,
in concluding that Paul was intending to speak about faith and
God's righteousness, and perhaps the connection between them.
Justication by grace through faith would then be part of a
discussion of God's righteousness, whereas in the basic conception
God's righteousness is part of the discussion of justication.
There is an even greater problem. If the paragraph is an
announcement of justication through faith, the grammar does not
match the meaning. The problem centres on dikaioymenoi (Rom.
3.24). Paul's statement is ei! q pantaq toyq pisteyontaq. oy! gar
e!stin diastolh, panteq gar h%marton kai y"steroyntai thq dojhq
toy ueoy dikaioymenoi dvrean (Rom. 3.22d24a). Dikaioymenoi is
in the nominative case, agreeing with panteq. That means that
according to the grammar Rom. 3.234a is a tri-partite statement
about àll': they have sinned, they lack the glory of God, they are
being justied freely. According to the justication account, all
human beings have sinned and lack the glory of God, but only all
believers are being justied. In the text, the àll' that refers to
believers is the pantaq of verse 22, whereas Paul, with his use of the
nominative and his sentence structure, clearly related it to panteq
23
24
e.g. Craneld, Romans, I, 21112.

e.g. Kasemann, Commentary on Romans, 101.
15
(verse 23). If Paul meant to give a justication account, his meaning

and his grammar do not match. His grammar works only if the àll'
who have sinned and the àll' who believe are the same group.
Wengst offers this as his response to Bultmann's complaint that the
contrast between sin and grace is attened out by Paul's dikaioymenoi.25 In that case, however, we have moved away from a
universal account of the justication of sinners to a more limited
topic, God's justication of believers. Then Rom. 3.23 ceases to be
a summary reference to Rom. 1.183.20 and it is no longer clear
why Paul had to make that precarious argument. The only alternative is that Paul's account shows him to be a universalist, but if
he was, it was clearly not on the basis that everybody had believed.
Further, according to the grammar, oy! gar e!stin diastolh
(Rom. 3.22d) gives a ground for the claim that righteousness is for
all who believe (Rom. 3.22c), and the whole of the rest of the
paragraph spells out the lack of distinction. It is more usual to see
Paul explaining that justication is for believers because everybody
has sinned and therefore needs grace. Then oy! gar e!stin diastolh
underlines this universality. It is not the major basis and pivotal
point of the paragraph that the grammar makes it.
In Rom. 3.216, the balance of the elements is odd in an
introductory justication account and the grammar is wrong.
Paul's mistake, or ours?
To summarize, we have three major discrepancies between the
basic conception and Paul's text. First, if the passage is a justication account, Rom. 1.183.20 must offer a convincing account of
the human predicament, that all have sinned and therefore cannot
be justied. The text fails to do this. There is no proof and the
rhetoric is so overdrawn that many exceptions can be found. The
appearance of Gentiles who do the law contradicts the conclusion.
Second, if Rom. 1.164.25 is a justication account, it is so out of
balance that the message of justication is not effectively communicated and most of the account is spent on supporting discussions.
These are necessary in the cultural context, but it is surprising that
they should crowd out the main point. Third, if Rom. 3.216 is the
core announcement of justication, the text is out of balance and
the grammar does not match the meaning. We cannot hope to solve
these problems by further research. Either Paul's justication
25
Formeln, 87.
16
account has fundamental weaknesses or we are mistaken in

assuming that he intended to present such an account.
This conclusion faces us with a choice. Do we continue with the
basic conception and acknowledge that Paul's argument is inadequate, or do we test the basic conception?
We can make a case for accepting that the basic conception is
right and Paul's argument is inadequate. That would be surprising,
since the justication theology is profoundly important in his
understanding of the gospel as we know it. Nevertheless, it is
possible. Sanders holds that Paul's thought moves from solution to
problem.26 The solution is justication by grace through faith in
Christ, therefore the problem is that humankind cannot be justied
on the basis of its own efforts. This is hard to demonstrate
empirically, particularly if it has to be demonstrated for God's
chosen people as well as for everyone else. Thus, it is not surprising
that Paul's argument in Rom. 1.183.20 is awed.27 We take it for
granted that Paul is difcult and often obscure. He was one of
those brilliant thinkers who have enormous difculty communicating with ordinary mortals. Developing his arguments by dictation, he did sometimes fail to say clearly what he meant. That could
account for imbalances and grammatical difculties. Paul was
incompetent as a communicator. Apparently he lost some of his
churches. At 2 Pet. 3.16 there is a reference to Paul's letters e!n ai_q
e!stin dysnohta tina. Then again, the basic conception has yielded
impressive meaning and theology in a long tradition of responsible
study. Few scholars have felt impelled to question it, and recent
readings on other bases have not persuaded the scholarly community that it should be seriously questioned.
If we want to accept that case and continue using the basic
conception to wrestle with an unsatisfactory text, we must recognize what that implies. In Paul's extant writings Rom. 1.183.20 is
the only attempt to demonstrate the human predicament empirically. For us, that makes it an isolated argument. As historians, we
know that it was not so for Paul. Romans is part of a long
theological and missionary struggle. If that was the best empirical
argument he could produce, surely he would have tried something
else long before he wrote this letter. The nearest argument in the
extant letters is that of Gal. 3.1014, that all who rely on the works
26
27
Palestinian Judaism, 443, 499.

Westerholm, Israel's Law and the Church's Faith, 1589.
17
of the law are under a curse. There Paul argued from scripture, not
empirically. We have no evidence that something was forcing him
to begin his letter to the Romans with an argument they could
hardly be expected to accept.
If we accept that Paul was an incompetent communicator, we
must realize that this involves accepting that he was so incompetent
that his presentation pulls away from his intention. He was not just
using difcult concepts, losing sentences, failing to make points
clear, or the like. He gave himself no chance to make his central
points clear, being preoccupied with secondary ones. As historians,
we must acknowledge that such incompetence is puzzling. There is
evidence that Paul was a competent communicator. He founded an
impressive number of churches in a hostile world. The churches of
Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Philippi, Thessalonica and in Philemon's
house kept his letters and shared them around to such good effect
that they entered the canon of scripture several centuries later. The
clause in 2 Pet. 3.16 looks different in context: e!n ai_q e!stin
dysnohta tina, a^ oi" a!maueiq kai a!sthriktoi strebloysin v"q kai
taq loipaq grafaq proq thn i! dian ay!tvn a!pvleian. Things are
hard to understand because of their nature, not because Paul did
not explain them clearly. Like other writings, they can be twisted.
Similarly, if Paul lost some churches, that could have been because
the message he did communicate was not accepted.
It seems that to accept that the mistakes are Paul's, not ours, is
to work in the shadow of historical improbability, and to risk
assuming that we know better than Paul did what he was trying to
do.
What is the case for seeking a better basic conception of the text?
First, the present one leaves us with insoluble problems concerned
with fundamental issues. Second, the discrepancies we identied are
interconnected. Both the account as a whole and Rom. 3.216 are
out of balance in that they concentrate on important but secondary
issues at the expense of justication itself. According to the
grammar of Rom. 3.234, the àll' who believe and the àll' who
have sinned are the same group. This implies that panteq . . .
h%marton may not be intended as a statement of universal sinfulness.
This links with Paul's failure to demonstrate universal sinfulness in
Rom. 1.183.20. Perhaps he was not trying to do so. A justication
account is a general theological statement, applying to all
humanity. The interconnecting problems could question this universal reference. Was Paul's concern more specic? Third, studies
18
taking account of recent work on the law have highlighted in Rom.

1.183.20 the argument that Jews are no better off than Gentiles.
Could this cast light on the grammar of Rom. 3.236, which makes
oy! gar e!stin diastolh (Rom. 3.22d) the key statement, not a
support for panteq . . . h%marton (Rom. 3.23a)? This again points to
a specic rather than a universal concern. If that had to do with
JewGentile relationships, it might lead to an explanation of the
imbalance in the whole text, including the space given to Jewish
questions in Rom. 3.274.25. Dunn suggests that in Rom. 3.2131
Paul spelt out in detail only the controversial part of his account.28
This raises the possibility that Romans was part of one of Paul's
controversies rather than a justication account. Ziesler's and
Wedderburn's accounts encourage us to look in the same direction.
If the question of God's righteousness proved to be as important as
Wedderburn suggests, Rom. 3.216 might not be out of balance at
all.
On this view, we must allow and test the hypothesis that Paul
was doing something other than giving a justication account,
either in general or with emphasis on certain Jewish questions. We
need to develop a new basic conception. If Paul was doing something else, and we identied it, we could expect our conception of
the passage to change in two major stages. In the rst stage, we
should see it as a justication account inuenced by the `something
else'. In the second, we should be working with a new basic
conception because we understood Paul's intention in the new way.
It could be that Pauline scholarship is in the process of such a twostage change, with the changes already brought about by study of
the law question representing the rst stage.
In taking up this possibility, however, we realize that Paul does
say panteq gar h%marton kai y"steroyntai thq dojhq toy ueoy
dikaioymenoi dvrean (Rom. 3.234a), a succinct statement about
justication. Our investigation has raised the possibility that the
panteq may refer to a group smaller than all humanity. If that
proved to be so, the smaller group would be a living example of
Paul's justication theology. Centuries of fruitful scholarly work
must not be cast aside lightly. If we simply say that Rom. 1.164.25
is not a justication account so it must be about something else, we
shall risk throwing a baby out with the bath water. The hypothesis
28
Romans, 183.
19
we need to develop is that Paul was talking about something else,

but the justication theology was important for whatever it was.
How do we proceed? We asked whether the mistakes are Paul's
or ours. Our hypothesis suggests that at least some of them are
ours. Accordingly, we must examine the exegetical methods and
procedures we have been using. What are our questions? How do
we seek answers to them?
3
R O M A N S 1.1 6 4. 25 : W H A T D O W E W A N T
TO KNOW?
To test the hypothesis that Rom. 1.164.25 may be something

other than a justication account, we must formulate and test an
alternative proposal. It should overcome the problems of the
present basic conception and not introduce others. We concluded
that the difculties we encountered in exegesis might arise from our
failure to understand correctly what Paul was trying to do rather
than from Paul's failure to achieve his purpose. Where in our
exegetical process could that kind of error arise?
We often describe the process in terms of the hermeneutical
circle. In explicating a text, we move between the whole and the
parts. Our understanding of the whole guides our understanding of
the parts. Study of the parts then modies our understanding of the
whole, and so on. Study of the detail of Rom. 1.164.25 in chapter
2 has made us question our understanding of the whole. That is
where we are most likely to be making the kind of mistake that
would cause the problems we identied. Thus, we are looking for a
new understanding of the whole, a new basic conception.
Our understanding of the whole of any text is complex, including,
for instance our knowledge of the setting, the writer, the language.
Two aspects are most important: what the text is about and what
kind of writing we are reading. The mainstream debate has long
been conducted within a consensus understanding of the whole of
Rom. 1.164.25 so strong that it is rarely discussed. In chapter 2 we
made explicit the accepted presupposition that the text is about
justication. We did not make explicit the presupposition concerning what kind of writing we are reading. This is because that
argument was conducted in the terms of the current debate and the
presupposition about the nature of the text does not surface in that
debate: the text is theological exposition. This was represented in
our argument by the formulation that the passage is seen as a
justication account.
20
What do we want to know?
21
What do we mean by `theological exposition'? This will become

clearer as we formulate an alternative understanding and expound
the text accordingly. For now, we can say that in theological
exposition the writer's purpose is to explain theological ideas. If the
explanation has a purpose beyond the sharing of ideas, it has little
impact on the explanation itself. Implications can come later. This
is usually taken to be the case in proposals that Paul's purpose in
Romans was to deal with problems in the Roman church, which he
does in Romans 1415, after laying his theological ground very
carefully. Thus, Rom. 1.164.25 contains statements of what Paul
takes to be universal truth. The recurring paq refers to every
human being. Theological exposition is addressed to an audience
interested in the ideas. It is not concerned with the readers as
persons, or with relating the ideas to them in their situation.
Accordingly, in mainstream exegesis very little account is taken of
Paul's audience.
We can also trace the presupposition that our text is theological
exposition in the debates on the purpose of Romans and on
Romans as letter. Scholars seek to identify Paul's purpose in
sending the Romans a letter comprising a long theological section
plus general and specic paraenesis. This approach excludes any
possibility that an examination of purpose could bring about
reappraisal of the idea that Romans 111 is treatise. The approach
to the question of what kind of letter we are reading is similar.
There is evidence that some scholars are uncomfortable with the
idea of a letter consisting largely of theological exposition, yet this
is certainly not impossible. The debate proceeds by coming to terms
with it. An example is Beker's study of contingency and coherence
in Romans. A letter, he says, is a word on target in a particular
situation. In this case, he concludes that the circumstances were
right for Paul to write a theological tractate for the Romans: `When
a letter assumes the features of a treatise, a problem of major
proportions is under discussion. And yet a treatise-type letter does
not necessarily negate its particularity.'1 There is no theoretical
reason why Paul should not have written a treatise-type letter, but
as long as we try to understand Romans on the basis that it is a
letter containing a major treatise, no other view is possible for us.
Accordingly, there has been no testing in the debate of the
1
Paul the Apostle, 77.
22
possibility that it might be something that Deissmann would have

been happier to call a letter than an epistle.2
The justication framework guides mainstream exegesis of Rom.
1.164.25. Investigating the problems of the passage has led us to
question both elements of that framework. We have strong grounds
for suspecting that the passage is not a justication account, and
good reason to suggest that it may not be an account, i.e. it may not
be theological exposition.
The purpose of the following chapters is to develop an alternative
exegesis of Rom. 1.164.25, arguing that it is valid, it overcomes
the problems of reading within the justication framework, and it
serves our exegetical purposes better than exegesis in the traditional
pattern. This exegesis arose from wrestling with the problems
created by the facts that the traditional readings do not match the
text, alternatives offered in the debate are no more successful, and
some problems are not noticed. The next stages of the argument
will be easier to follow if we now present a brief outline of the
approach taken and its main results.
The exegesis is in two steps, a teleological and a causal exposition
(or reading). The rst step, the teleological exposition, is a rediscovery of what Paul was intending to say to the Romans. We call it
teleological because the aim is to understand the text in terms of
Paul's purpose. It answers the question, Where was this text going
to? This step depends on careful examination of Paul's purpose in
writing and of the nature of the text, and entails a very careful,
audience-oriented reading of the text. The second step, the causal
exposition, is an examination of the major theological presuppositions underlying what Paul was intending to say, the justication
theology and the Creatorcreature relationship. We call it causal
because the aim is to understand the text as expression of Paul's
thought. It answers the question, Where was this text coming from?
These steps correspond to two interdependent and mutually illuminating elements of meaning in the text.
Exegesis of Rom. 1.164.25 by this method offers a radically new
view of the nature of the whole. It is not theological exposition but
something we describe best as pastoral preaching. It is not a
justication account but is about God's righteousness and its
implications for the believers receiving the preaching. The driving
question is not, How can we be righteous in God's sight since we
2
Bible Studies, 359.
23
are sinners? It is, How can God be righteous in our sight if he

justies believing sinners without reference to the JewGentile
distinction? The pastoral preaching draws on Paul's theology of
justication, and thus gives us access to this aspect of his thought.
The rst step is the teleological exposition. In Romans, Paul was
making his rst contact with the Roman church/es. He did it by
beginning to exercise among them his apostolic ministry of
preaching the gospel. His letter can best be understood as preaching
to believers, rehearsing the gospel as they live under it. The context
was the church's agonizing over the question of whether Gentiles
who came to faith in Christ had to become Jews. Paul said that this
must not be required. He knew that this stand laid his preaching
and ordering of church life open to the theological charge of
preaching a God who had abandoned Israel and therefore could
not be trusted, and to the ethical charge of encouraging antinomianism and immorality. He also knew that decision-making on
this question involved many aspects of community and personal
life. These were deep-rooted and affected people's lives in important
ways. His purpose in this letter as a whole was to help the Romans
to share and act upon his insight into the way believers' lives are
shaped by the new action the God of Israel was taking in Christ
and the gospel, in this case in the difcult matter of JewGentile
relationships within the community of believers.
In Rom. 1.164.25, his aim was to help the Romans, especially
those with a very conservative understanding of Israel's election, to
come to terms with an important corollary of their faith in Christ.
God's action in Christ fullled the purpose of Israel's election by
breaking the bounds of Israel. Realizing this was not simply a step in
theological awareness. It involved a new understanding of God and
new self-understanding. Such a change affects not just one's actions,
but who one perceives oneself to be. The process is painful. Paul did
not apologize for the pain, but he was aiming to make it fruitful.
God was righteous, and God's righteousness required that God be
faithful to the covenant with Israel and be the impartial eschatological judge. How, then, could God be righteous in justifying on the
basis of believing alone? This new action seemed to be God's
abandonment of faithful Israel. Paul presented it as the fullment of
God's faithfulness to unfaithful Israel, and then as the fullment of
God's purpose in the election of Israel. Thus, Rom. 1.1617 is not
the theme statement for a theological exposition, but a grasping of
the nettle of debate: salvation is simply on the basis of believing, and
24
this gospel includes the election of Israel. Rom. 1.183.20 is not a

demonstration that all have sinned, but the stripping away of
defences that leaves the conservative believer face to face with the
fact that sinful Jew is in exactly the same position as sinful Gentile
before God's righteous judgement. Rom. 3.216 is not the announcement of justication through faith, but the demonstration
that in the Cross God fulls his righteousness as Israel's saviour and
judge, doing it precisely in the action that breaks the bounds of
Israel. Rom. 3.274.25 is not a discussion of faith and of the
continuity of the gospel with God's former action with Israel.
Rather, the same conservative believer is shown the history of God's
action with Israel in the new light of its fullment in Christ. It
becomes clear that justication through faith was God's purpose
from the beginning. The question here for Paul and the Romans was
not how people can be righteous and thus acceptable to a righteous
God. It was how God could be seen to be righteous when his new
action in the Cross looked unrighteous and had to be viewed, not
from the neutral territory of theological argument, but from the
midst of the painful life-adjustments it was demanding. This particular question about God's righteousness did not arise from the
justication of sinners simply on the basis of their faith, although
consideration of that question could have helped to form the
theology on which Paul was drawing. It arose from the justication
of believing sinners without reference to the JewGentile distinction.
In step 2, the causal exposition, we examine the underlying
theology. Traditionally, we have read Rom. 1.164.25 as if it were
a justication account, either as doctrine Dodd, for instance or
as a polemical presentation, as in the case of Dunn. We have been
reading a theological presupposition of what Paul was intending to
say to the Romans, and reading it as though it were itself what he was
intending to say to them. This has distorted the text, as we saw in
chapter 2, and allowed for a misleading element in interpretation of
the theology.
We may state the immediate theological presupposition of what
Paul was intending to say to the Romans in the form èvery believer
is a sinner justied by God's grace'. This says nothing about the
rest of humanity. We have noted that Paul did not offer any
convincing demonstration that all have sinned. When we examine
in detail what he was intending to say to the Romans, we shall nd
that his discussion presupposes that everybody he was talking to
was a sinner. When he mentioned God's act of redemption through
25
Christ, he was referring the Romans to what they already knew.

His presupposition was derived from the fact that his hearers had
accepted Christ as a means of dealing with their sin. Since Paul
clearly believed that the gospel was for everybody, we may state the
immediate theological presupposition of this passage in the general
form `human beings are sinners offered justication as God's gift,
to be received by faith'. Formulated thus, it is a universal statement,
the stuff of philosophical-theological discussion, like the form in
which scholarly debate normally handles it. Indeed, its universality
is essential to its validity as a statement about how human beings
can be acceptable to a righteous God. If this can be achieved by
human effort, the prescription is to try harder. This universal form
of the presupposition is not the form in which it appears in the text.
Rom. 1.183.20 fails to work as a demonstration that all have
sinned because it was never intended to do so. That is not its
function in what Paul was intending to say to the Romans.
Accordingly, it cannot serve that purpose when we study the text
seeking insight into Paul's thought. Rather, it shows what sin is,
and how sin distorts even the gift of grace, election, into a
possession. In Rom. 3.216, the justication theology becomes a
presupposition of Paul's demonstration of the way Israel's God is
righteous in justifying all believing sinners without reference to the
JewGentile divide.
A problem with the justication account in traditional readings
of the passage is that justication by grace through faith is easily
seen as an emergency measure to which God was driven by human
inability to overcome sin. This comes through with brutal clarity in
the RSV translation of Rom. 3.22d24a. Oy! gar e!stin diastolh,
panteq gar h%marton kai y"steroyntai thq dojhq toy ueoy dikaioymenoi dvrean tBh ay!toy xariti becomes `For there is no distinction; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they
are justied by his grace as a gift.' Since they have sinned and fall
short of the glory of God they are justied by his grace. In Paul's
text, being justied freely by God's grace is one of three closely
related elements providing the ground for the lack of distinction.
Yet this translation is widely accepted as expressing his intention.
After all, he did not say it very clearly. Most of the ofcial English
Bible translations help him out in these verses. In doing so, they
obscure what he was intending to say to the Romans. In the
context of this logic of emergency, the continuity function of the
Abraham argument in Romans 4 is to show that the new measure is
26
not inconsistent with God's previous action with Israel. In

searching for what Paul intended to say to the Romans, we found
that the discussion of Abraham demonstrates that the divine
human relationship of grace and the response of faith is God's
purpose in the election of Israel.
This outline points to something that will be clearer when we
have discussed the methodology of this exegesis and the detail of
the text. For now, it will sufce to say that the justication theology
is a presupposition of what Paul was intending to say to the
Romans, but the form in which we nd it in the text is shaped by
the way Paul was using it. To put it another way, the text is
generated partly by the theology, but the form in which we nd the
theology is generated by Paul's intention in dictating the text.
The passage also reveals a more basic theological presupposition
of what Paul was intending to say to the Romans, the relationship
between Creator and creature. For Paul, sin is the breakdown of
the proper Creatorcreature relationship, and salvation is its restoration, with the re-creation of the image of God in the human, the
divine glory. The proper Creatorcreature relationship is human
faith responding to God's grace. The importance of this element of
meaning in the text is reected in mainstream exegeses, notably in
the creation faithfulness readings of Kasemann and his school.
Barrett's commentary reects the text more accurately. He
recognizes the importance of the theme in Paul's thinking here, but
does not impose it on Paul's address to the Romans.3
Recognition of this theological presupposition is essential to a
proper understanding of the text, but the attempt to treat it as what
Paul was intending to say to the Romans distorts the text. Again,
the text is generated partly by the theology, but the form in which
we nd the theology in the text is generated by Paul's intention in
creating it.
This outline shows that our reading could overcome the problems we identied in chapter 2.
Rom. 1.183.20 does not demonstrate that all have sinned
because it has another purpose.
The different concerns may well account for what seemed
strange imbalances when the passage was read as a justication account.
3
A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 812.
27
Rom. 3.216 seems to be about God's righteousness as it is

expressed in justifying believers. This will probably
account for the balance of elements in that pericope.
An argument presupposing that all believers are sinners
justied by grace could avoid the problems associated with
dikaioymenoi in Rom. 3.24a.
The justication theology is described as a theological
presupposition of what Paul was intending to say to the
Romans. This, if credible, explains the role of that theology
in the meaning of the passage.
The outline therefore represents an hypothesis worth testing. It also
raises major questions.
Why and on what basis does somebody separate theological presuppositions from what Paul was intending to say
(not, what he said) to the Romans?
What kind of reading treats the text as having a thread of
argument running through it, but also as a painful but
necessary pastoral procedure, like surgery?
These questions drive us to some prior ones.
What are we historical-critical exegetes seeking when we
study a text?
What do we mean by the questions we ask?
The process of study and interpretation of the NT texts has been
continuous from their rst readings. In almost two millennia there
have been great changes and we can identify periods and styles of
exegesis. One cannot rule lines across history, though. Changes
come about by changing elements in scholarly understanding. We
cannot simply abandon the ambience in which we learnt the Bible
or our teachers' inuence. This combination of continuity and
change can create problems, especially in periods of experiment,
such as the present. For instance, what scholars mean by their
questions may change, evolving even to a point where an outsider
would nd a disjunction between what the words of a question said
and what the questioner was actually wanting to discover.
One such tension in current exegesis is between the intention of
taking Romans seriously as a letter and the fact that we have been
28
reading not Paul's communication but a theological presupposition. If we explore why this has been happening, we shall nd some
answers about what we are seeking and what we mean by our
questions.
There are many reasons, but three interlocking ones seem most
important. The real focus of exegesis is on the theology, Paul's
thought. As children of the Enlightenment we prefer causal to
teleological explanation. We have mistaken the nature of the text.
The impact of these factors is strengthened by the fact that the
questions of what we are trying to achieve and what we want to
know are not normally on a public agenda and discussion of them
is not a signicant element in the training of new scholars.
Stated so bluntly, the three reasons seem as controversial as the
claim that we have been reading a theological presupposition rather
than the text as letter. We must explicate them.
We begin with the claim that the focus of exegesis is the theology,
Paul's thought. Apparently, the controversial aspect of this is not
whether or not it is true, but what the point of saying it is. Of
course we are interested in Paul's theology. We see no difference
between that and being interested in what he says, taking his letters
seriously. Yet one occasionally hears in scholarly conversation an
objection that exegesis at the level of what Paul was saying would
lead to shallow exegesis. This implies a (submerged!) recognition
that there is more to the meaning of the text than what Paul was
intending to say and we want an in-depth understanding. If our
pursuit of this has led us to miss what Paul was intending to say, we
have not fully achieved our goal.
We historical-critical exegetes are heirs of the exegetical tradition.
One of the starting points of historical-critical exegesis was the
insistence that the biblical texts are not unmediated divine theological truth, but human documents that must be taken seriously for
what they are. This includes taking seriously the fact that the
Pauline documents are letters, mostly addressed to particular
people facing or creating particular problems. Yet our inherited
understanding of them is as theology rst and foremost. More than
two centuries of historical-critical study has related these factors by
understanding that Paul addressed theological letters to pastoral
situations. Beker calls this `Paul's contextual way of doing
theology',4 and most of us concur.
4
Paul the Apostle, e.g. 31, 131.
29
The second factor contributing to our error of reading a theological presupposition instead of the letter is our preference for causal
over teleological explanation. Basically, we understand Paul's
letters in terms of his theological thinking. His pastoral, or other,
intention is handled as a separate question. For instance, commentators normally treat the purpose of Romans as an introductory
question. The commentary will include thorough discussion of the
concepts of righteousness and faith, and the question of their
meaning will be kept in play, but the questions of purpose will not.
A teleological explanation would understand the text in terms of
Paul's purpose. As a letter it would be understood as address to his
intended audience. Understanding of his theological thinking
would contribute to the explanation.
The rst step of the two-step exegesis outlined above is a
teleological explanation of the text. Expositions within the justication framework are causal explanations. A closer look at Rom.
1.1617 will clarify this claim. In the commentaries, the usual
procedure for expounding these verses is to examine Paul's important concepts and analyse the statement as a theological proposition. The context taken into account is the thought context. For
instance, Paul's concept of righteousness is different from ours. The
audience is rarely mentioned, and the audience actually being taken
into account is The Reader, an ahistorical mind seeking to understand Paul's ideas. In the church of Paul's time, the statement could
well have appeared challenging, even inammatory. Nobody asks
whether Paul expected the Romans to respond by analysing it
conceptually. The procedure used to arrive at such a reading
identies it as a causal explanation of the text. The debate proceeds
on the assumption that this causal explanation is also a teleological
explanation. This could be true, but it would be true only if Paul
intended to give an account of his thought. It could be that because
we have developed causal explanations of the text, we have
concluded that Paul's purpose was to express his thought. There is
little safeguard against this in the debate.
The teleological explanation of Rom. 1.1617 in step 1 of our
exegesis looks very different. Paul and the Romans were interested
in whether Gentile believers had to become Jews. Paul knew that
the Romans would have heard about his controversial view, and he
could expect that their conceptions of, and responses to, it would
vary. With this statement, he was entering the discussion with a
clear claim: salvation is indeed for all who believe without any
30
other requirement. This is action of God's righteousness, and it

includes the election of Israel and the fullment of the word of her
prophet. This teleological explanation sees Paul making a particular
claim to particular people who might well doubt its validity.
The difference between these two explanations shows in the
treatment of terms such as `faith'. In traditional causal explanation,
the exegete observes that faith is needed for salvation. The appropriate response is to give some account of Paul's understanding of
faith. In the teleological explanation, Paul was using the word
`faith' to enter into the discussion about whether or not believing in
Christ was all that was required for salvation. Thus, the appropriate response is to take `faith' here to mean `believing in Christ'
without making judgements about Paul's wider understanding.
Our preference for causal explanation is natural to children of
the Enlightenment and is encouraged by our inherited understanding of the texts as theological statement. We need a substantial incentive to try another mode of explanation.
The third reason why we have been reading a theological
presupposition as if it were the letter is our incorrect identication
of the nature of the text as theological exposition. This wrong
identication has led us past what Paul was intending to say to the
Romans, directing our attention instead to his theological presuppositions. The claims that the current debate presupposes that the
text is theological exposition, and that it is best understood as
pastoral preaching, will be explicated and fully argued. The contrasting examples already offered should give some indication of
what they mean.
In mainstream exegesis of Pauline texts the underlying question
is, What does this text mean? It is answered in a single line of
exposition, and all the detailed questions contribute to the answering of this unstated question. This presupposes that we can
handle the text as letter and as evidence for Paul's thought both at
once. We have now identied these as separate concerns. They
represent different questions about the texts, the rst about what
Paul was intending to say to his addressees, the second about Paul's
thought. The answers would be the same only if Paul was intending
to expound his thought. Accordingly, the unstated question should
be acknowledged, rejected and replaced with, We want to explore
the meaning of this text. This conclusion is the rst-fruits of our
examination of the problems of exegesis of Rom. 1.164.25, and it
coincides with our response in chapter 1 to the breakdown of the
31
tool question, What does this text mean? It is the starting point of
the two-step method of exegesis. This method requires that we give
more attention to ourselves as exegetes than we see in mainstream
exegesis. We do this primarily for the sake of guarding the integrity
of the text. We need to consider carefully what questions will
enable us to explore the meaning of a particular text. They will
include what Paul was intending to say to whomever he was
addressing, what kind of discourse this is and what theological
presuppositions are in play.
In her article Ìn his own Image?', Hooker illustrates from
Synoptic studies the way answers to questions are largely determined by the questioners' outlook.5 Practitioners of source criticism understood the evangelists to be concerned with compiling a
careful and complete record of events. The exponents of form
criticism saw them as collectors of pericopae that confront hearers
with the gospel. For redaction critics, they were theologians uninterested in history. We may add to Hooker's observation that the
questioners also determine the questions. To allow our work to be
governed by the text is a challenging ideal. She reminds us that we
cannot escape from ourselves, and therefore need to be aware of
our own presuppositions.6 This danger of making the NT writer in
our own image has been recognized again in the context of readerresponse criticism. Beavis comments, `[T]he model of the evangelist
implicit in most Marcan studies is that of a (modern) scholar
writing for other scholars.'7 Similarly, the model of the apostle
implicit in most Pauline studies is of Paul as a scholar writing for
other scholars. This Paul is a curious amalgam of rst- and
twentieth-century models, writing theological arguments for the
rst numbers of NTS or ZNW, AD 56.
This charge may seem outrageous. We know that Paul is not like
us. We have spent dedicated lifetimes exploring the Classical,
Mandaean, Nag Hammadi, Qumran, apocalyptic, Wisdom, rabbinic, mystery religions, magical, Hellenistic popular and every
other category of ancient literature, learning languages, examining
coins and archaeological sites. We know that Paul's methods of
argument differ from ours and we do not reject them just because
they are not always convincing to us. Of course we treat Paul as a
5
Ìmage', 2841, 29.

Ibid., 41.
7
`Literary and Sociological Aspects of the Function of Mark 4:1112', 79. Her
italics. See also Fowler, Loaves and Fishes, 412.
6
32
scholar. He was. He was trained in the techniques of rabbinic

argument and knew his scripture intimately. All this is true and
no defence against the charge. The problem is that we treat Paul's
texts as though he were doing what scholars do when they write for
each other. He was making the best possible argument. He was
speaking mind to mind, not person to person. He was seeking an
intellectual response, an assessment that his argument was good
enough to establish his conclusion. Any action he hoped for would
ow from that.
This approach is so universal that it is hard to illustrate because
there are no contrasting examples. It shows most clearly in cases
that are extreme, so that it may seem unfair to cite them as
examples. The point is that they are not normally noted as
surprising. Conzelmann comments that 1 Cor. 3.16 àddresses the
reader with surprising directness'.8 What does this mean? Paul was
dictating a letter to the Corinthians. It was to be read aloud by one
person while the rest listened. In this setting, Conzelmann's remark
can mean only that Paul stopped addressing the Corinthians he had
been addressing since 1 Cor. 1.1 and directed a remark to the
person reading the letter to them. Conzelmann's words mean that,
but we do not suppose that Conzelmann meant it. His words make
sense in his own setting. If he wrote, `Do you not know . . .?' in a
scholarly article, he would be addressing the reader with surprising
directness. Paul's oy!k oi date; is characteristic of his address to his
churches. Conzelmann has slipped into reading Paul's text as if
Paul were a scholar writing for scholars.
Barrett argues that in modern book production Rom. 3.28 `could
best be placed in a footnote'.9 This suggestion looks anachronistic
if one takes seriously that Paul was dictating something he thought
of as a letter, for people to hear. Footnotes are suited to academic
discourse, in print. It is not just that Paul lacked the facility to
produce a footnote. He was working in a different context, and
would not have used such a facility anyway. There must be some
other explanation of Rom. 3.28.
Kelber's hypothesis that Paul's choice of the letter form may
betray a preference for orality10 shows how close we often come to
assuming that our interest in Paul's thought was matched by his
intention to give an account of it. What other literary form would
8
9
10
1 Corinthians, 77.
The Oral and the Written Gospel, 140.
33
have served Paul's purposes? One can hardly imagine him sending a
gospel to the Corinthians.
We make Paul in our own image when we work on the assumption that he was doing the kind of thing we do, and when we
unconsciously treat the text as though what we are looking for is
what he intended his readers to nd, even though we are not his
intended readers. This is the phenomenon Hooker noted. It has
turned Paul into a scholar and his letters into abstruse scholarly
writings, however situational and polemical.
Our tasks are now clear. The rst is to show in more detail why
and on what ground we have separated what Paul was intending to
say to the Romans from the theological presuppositions of what he
was intending to say to them. The second is to dene the nature of
the whole we are reading. Setting aside the presuppositions that
Rom. 1.164.25 is about Paul's justication theology and a passage
of theological exposition, we must try to identify Paul's purpose in
writing it, and to understand what kind of discourse it is. The third
task is detailed exegesis in the two steps already outlined. This will
test our answers to the other questions, and also our claim that
separating the question of what Paul was intending to say to the
Romans from the study of Paul's thought will serve both our
exegetical purposes and the integrity of Paul's text better than the
single-strand exegesis we currently practise.
4
THE BASIS FOR SEPARATING
P R E S U P PO S I T I O N S F R O M IN TE N D E D
ADDRESS
The two-step exegesis outlined in chapter 3 deals rst with what

Paul intended to say to the Romans (teleological exposition) and
then with two theological presuppositions of what he was intending
to say (causal exposition). We do this because it serves our interests
and the integrity of Paul's text better than exegesis answering the
single question, What does this text mean?
Our interests are commitment to taking the text seriously as the
kind of human document it is, a letter from Paul to the believers in
Rome, and concern to understand Paul's thought, his theology. We
saw in chapter 3 that they would be completely congruent only if
Paul intended to give an account of his thought. Thus, treating the
text in a single discussion based on the implied question, What does
this text mean? will probably make us blur together the answers to
the two questions, leaving both unclear. It will also entail the risk
of reading Paul's intended communication through our interest in
his theology, thereby making Paul in our own image.
These factors would apply to any contemporary exegesis of any
Pauline text. In this study of Rom. 1.164.25, there is another. We
are seeking a new understanding of the text as a whole, so we have
a particular responsibility to dene our questions clearly and to
deal separately with them, without ignoring the interconnections.
The other reason for trying to separate Paul's intended communication and his theological thought is that this serves the integrity
of Paul's text better than single-strand exegesis. It allows us to
better identify the nature of the text and Paul's intention in creating
it, and without risk of trivializing his apostolic work. Romans is
part of that work, not just a reection on it.
The outlines in chapter 3 give a preview of the new exegesis,
indicating that the text will look different.
In chapter 3, we proposed replacing our implicit guiding question, What does this text mean?, with a statement of aim: We want
34
Separating presuppositions from address
35
to explore the meaning of this text. That pictures the meaning of

the text as complex, something we explore, rather than as unitary,
something we follow through. Working as historical-critical exegetes, we are concerned with the meaning of the text as Paul's, and
not with the hermeneutical possibilities it might offer if it were cut
loose from its rst-century, Pauline, letter context.
This explicit statement that meaning in a text is complex corresponds to certain facts recognized in the existing debate. One is that
to make sense of what Paul was saying, we must understand the
context in which he was speaking. Another is that asking different
questions about a text will bring out different aspects of its
meaning. No single exegesis exhausts the meaning of a text.
These facts relate to the commonplace observation that a text
contains more meaning than the author intended to convey to the
audience. The people who take advantage of this include historians
and detectives:
The real history is written in forms not meant as history. In
Wardrobe accounts, in Privy Purse expenses, in personal
letters, in estate books. If someone, say, insists that Lady
Whoosit never had a child, and you nd in the account
book the entry: `For the son born to my lady on Michaelmas eve: ve yards of blue ribbon, fourpence halfpenny', it's a reasonably fair deduction that my lady had a
son on Michaelmas eve.1
The deduction is `reasonably fair' because the account-keeper was
not concerned to record the birth. NT scholars, as historians, do
the same. Redaction critics use clues the NT writers did not intend
to leave.
We may want to say that at least some of the èxtra' we nd in
texts would be more helpfully classied as information than as
meaning. This might apply to the reconstruction of the situation in
Galatia that we derive from Galatians, for example. Yet our understanding of Galatians is shaped by that ìnformation'. Similarly,
scholars' conclusions about redaction history affect their understanding of the meaning of the texts. In the case of the quotation
above, the information that the child was born helps to account for
the fourpence halfpenny expended, but it is indispensable to the
meaning of the text of the imaginary account book, and not just to
1
Tey, The Daughter of Time, 96.
36
the meaning of the text of the novel. It would be hard to say that it
is just information, and not part of the meaning. This is often true.
A clear-cut example is allegory, where the point is made by the
interrelation of two elements of meaning in the text. On the one
hand, we read the adventures of the villain, the knight and the
damsel fair and, on the other, we trace the vicissitudes of Virtue
under threat from Evil.
Interconnected elements of meaning are clearly visible in Rom.
6.111. This passage contains the fullest discussion of baptism in
the extant letters, yet it is obvious that Paul's intention was not to
discuss baptism as such. He was dealing with the suggestion that
believers should sin so that grace may abound. He explained at
length that this is nonsense because believers have died to sin
through their baptism into Christ. He was drawing on an understanding of baptism to make his point about life in Christ. We
know that his intention was to quash the suggestion because that
accounts for all of the text, whereas if we concluded that his
intention was to instruct the Romans on baptism, we could not
account for Rom. 6.12.
We note also that this discussion arises from two concepts
characteristic of Paul's thought, being in Christ and living to God.
They come to explicit expression in Rom. 6.1011. They are
important elements of the meaning of the text, although we could
follow what Paul was saying to the Romans without being aware of
their importance, even without identifying them as concepts in their
own right. For understanding Paul's thought, they are very signicant.
It is comparatively easy to identify elements of meaning in Rom.
6.111 because the presuppositions are more than usually visible,
and because we are familiar with Paul's surviving letters. We now
turn to a less familiar text where secondary elements of meaning
are not explicit:
The Parson is very exact in the governing of his house,
making it a copy and model for his Parish. He knows the
temper, and pulse of every person in his house, and
accordingly either meets with their vices, or advanceth
their virtues. His wife is either religious, or night and day
he is winning her to it. Instead of the qualities of the world,
he requires only three of her; rst, a training up of her
children and maids in the fear of God, with prayers, and
37
catechizing, and all religious duties. Secondly, a curing,

and healing of all wounds and sores with her own hands;
which skill either she brought with her, or he takes care she
shall learn it of some religious neighbour. Thirdly, a
providing for her family in such sort, as that neither they
want a competent sustentation, nor her husband be
brought in debt. His children he rst makes Christians,
and then Commonwealth's men; the one he owes to his
heavenly Country, the other to his earthly, having no title
to either, except he do good to both. Therefore having
seasoned them with all Piety, not only of words in praying,
and reading; but in actions, in visiting other sick children,
and tending their wounds, and sending his charity by them
to the poor, and sometimes giving them a little money to
do it of themselves, that they get a delight in it, and enter
into favour with God, who weighs even children's actions
(1 Kings 14:12, 13) . . . His servants are all religious, and
were it not his duty to have them so, it were his prot, for
none are so well served, as by religious servants, both
because they do best, and because what they do, is blessed,
and prospers. After religion, he teacheth them, that three
things make a complete servant, Truth, and Diligence, and
Neatness, or Cleanliness. Those that can read, are allowed
times for it, and those that cannot, are taught; for all in his
house are either teachers or learners, or both, so that his
family is a School of Religion, and they all account, that to
teach the ignorant is the greatest alms . . . He keeps his
servants between love, and fear, according as he nds
them; but generally he distributes it thus, To his Children
he shows more love than terror, to his servants more terror
than love; but an old good servant boards a child.
This text is an account of the way the Parson rules his household.
Clearly, the author's intention was to give this account. We may,
however, be more interested in its picture of an hierarchical household. At this point, our interest distracts us from the author's
intention. From the text, we could produce a diagram of the
household structure, showing the members' functions and relationships. The author did not intend to give this picture; it inevitably
appears in the text he created by giving his account of the way the
Parson rules the household.
38
We may call the household structure the sociological presupposition of the intended account of the Parson's ruling of the household. It is integral to the meaning of the text, although not what the
text `says' or what the author was intending to say to the reader. In
outlining the two-step exegesis of Rom. 1.164.25, we noticed that
the text is generated partly by the justication theology, but the
form in which we nd the theology is controlled by Paul's intention
in dictating the text. Similarly, this text is generated partly by the
realities the sociological presupposition represents, but the form in
which we nd the sociological presupposition is generated by the
author's intention in creating the text. There is, for instance, no
discussion of the roles and relationships of the individual servants.
We have been told nothing about who wrote this text, its context
or its origin. We have observed in it both an account of the way the
Parson rules his household and a picture of the household structure. We say unhesitatingly that the former is what the author
intended to say to the readers and the latter is its sociological
presupposition. Why are we sure? The account of the way the
Parson rules is what is made explicit, it accounts for all of the text,
and it accounts for the presence of the picture of the household
structure. If we thought that the picture of the structure was what
the author intended to say to the readers, we could not account for
all the detail about the Parson's doings.
If we learn that our text comes from George Herbert's The
Country Parson,2 we can bring to bear in interpreting it the
information that Herbert worked in seventeenth-century England
and was gentleman, parson and poet. Further, he says that his
purpose in writing was to describe a true pastor in order to give
himself a mark to aim at, and perhaps provide the basis for à
complete Pastoral'.3 A biographer studying Herbert's personality
or an historian interested in the status of women or in attitudes to
servants might notice the way the Parson perceives his responsibility and his authority, and compare the relationships with those
of other cultures. A reader of the whole book will notice that this
account exemplies the paternalism that characterizes the entire
account of the Parson's duties.
What can direct our attention away from what the author
intended to say? In examining this passage, we have noticed three
2
3
The Country Parson, The Temple, 689.

Ibid., 54.
39
factors. If another element of the meaning is particularly interesting

to us, it will draw our attention. This happens with the picture of
the household structure. If we bring to the text questions arising
from our concerns rather than from the author's, they will direct
our attention away from what the author intended to say. This
happens for the biographer and the historian. If we see the passage
in the context of the whole work, we may notice elements of
meaning that were not signicant for the author as he wrote this
section. The paternalism is an example. These factors are connected
with the fact that we do not belong to the personal and cultural
context in which the text was written and intended to be read. We
judge it to be a good, not a bad, thing that our attention is drawn
to these elements, because they enrich our understanding of a text
from which we are alienated to some extent by cultural distance.
We shall not, though, let the value of this wider exploration cancel
out our awareness of the author's intention. After our exploration,
we shall still say that this text is Herbert's account of the way the
Parson rules his household. We may add that we nd it an
interesting historical source.
We have applied to a non-biblical text the kind of procedure that
we have suggested applying to Rom. 1.164.25, and that we used in
commenting on Rom. 6.111. There is nothing startling about our
observations. They are simply a conscious observation of processes
that are normally either unconscious in our general reading (such
as sorting out an author's intention from interesting presuppositions) or part of conscious processes that are not aimed at understanding a text but do enrich our understanding (such as the
biographer's and the historian's questions). Why insist that these
observations are important? What can we learn from them for our
search for a new understanding of the whole of Rom. 1.164.25?
They are important for two reasons. They help us to understand
how we can have been reading a theological presupposition of
Rom. 1.164.25 instead of what Paul intended to say to the
Romans, and they give the basis in the nature of texts for
separating theological presuppositions from what Paul was intending to say to the Romans. It is a matter of fact that texts
contain more than their creators were intending to communicate. It
is a matter of experience that in reading texts from other cultures
we are more likely to give serious attention to this extra than we are
in the case of texts from our own cultural context. A good example
of this is reading theology from earlier periods, when we can
40
become very attentive to presuppositions, what is considered a

valid argument, what questions are worth asking.4
That is to say, texts by their nature contain more than their
authors were intending to communicate. With familiar texts and
texts from our own context, we perform an unconscious sorting
process. If we read texts that are unfamiliar because of cultural or
chronological distance, or if we use any text to answer questions to
which it was not addressed, we become more aware of the extra
meaning.
Paul's letters, like the rest of the Bible, fall into a peculiar
combination of these categories. They are familiar, yet we read
them as strangers. They belong to a cultural milieu different from
ours, yet they have been important in forming ours. Further, we
read them as heirs of nineteen centuries of intensive study in which
they have been considered in various cultural contexts, and used to
answer questions other than those that their authors addressed.
One result is that an enormous amount of the extra information
has come to our attention, and is part of the way we read the
familiar texts. We cannot read Paul's letters as ordinary letters
because we know too much before we start, yet we are committed
to taking them seriously as letters. This constitutes a special case
for consciously sorting out what we nd when we explore the
meaning of a Pauline letter.
What, then, can we learn from our observations to help our
search for a new understanding of the whole of Rom. 1.164.25?
First, the nature of the whole, what it is about and what kind of
text it is, is created by the author's intention. Thus, the extract from
The Country Parson is an account of the way the Parson rules his
household, not an analysis of the household structure. Rom.
6.111 is an hortatory argument about why believers cannot sin
that grace may abound, not teaching about baptism. The extract
from The Daughter of Time includes an entry from an account
book, not a birth announcement. To see what kind of a whole we
are reading, we must pay careful attention to Paul's intention, not
just his over-all purpose in writing the letter, but also his particular
purpose in our passage. This is one reason why we ask not what
Paul said to the Romans, but what he was intending to say to them.
Second, what the writer is saying to the reader accounts for all of
4
Athanasius' account of the reasons why the Lord had to die on the Cross (`De
Incarnatione' 25) provides a vivid example.
41
a text and for other meaning that may be found in it. Thus, the
description of the way the Parson rules his household accounts for
all of the text of our Herbert passage, and for the presence of the
other meaning we found, notably the picture of the household
structure. Similarly, rejection of the idea of sinning that grace may
abound accounts for the whole of Rom. 6.111 and for the
presence of the discussion of baptism and the concepts of being in
Christ and living to God. In the account book, the record of
expenditure of the fourpence halfpenny explains why the child's
birth is mentioned, whereas we should be greatly surprised at a
birth announcement that itemized expenditure on ribbons!
Extra meaning genuinely present in a text is a by-product of the
work of writing what the author was intending to communicate.
Thus, the two are necessarily related. If we found in a text extra
meaning unrelated to what the author was intending to say, we
should be reading it in. We should be guilty of eisegesis. Since we
are condent that the justication theology is part of the meaning
of Rom. 1.164.25, we can assume that what Paul was intending to
say to the Romans will be related to it, will account for its presence
in the text. Thus, if we examine the problems we faced when we
read the text as if he had been intending to give a justication
account, we should nd clues to what he was intending to say to
them.
Our observations about the nature of meaning in texts and the
way we respond to it as readers also have implications for the way
we approach the text after we have identied the nature and
subject-matter of the whole.
First, we noticed that a reader who does not belong in the
personal and cultural context of a text is likely to be distracted
away from what the author intended to say to other elements of
meaning. Thus, our practice of trying to reconstruct the situation
and understand the cultural milieu will be very important. It will
help us to understand the context in which Paul's letter was created
and intended to function. We shall need to be aware, too, of our
tendency to be distracted away from what Paul was intending to
say to the Romans towards other elements of meaning in the text.
The procedure of undertaking rst a teleological and then a
causal reading will help us to deal with that issue. The teleological
reading is our attempt to identify that element of meaning in the
text which is what Paul was intending to say to the Romans. In the
case of Rom. 6.111, for instance, that is his account of why
42
believers do not sin that grace may abound. Questions about his
understanding of baptism or his concept of being in Christ belong
to the causal exposition, which examines the theology from which
his discussion sprang.
Second, we must give attention to what we mean by the
statement that what the writer is saying to the reader accounts for
all of the text. This means that there are no words or phrases
unexplained, superuous to the meaning, apparently inadequate or
excessive for the purpose they are serving. The author created a text
consisting of these words in this order in the process of carrying out
a particular purpose.
Because we are interested in Paul's theology and have a tradition
of understanding the text as an expression of his thought, we are
likely to take àccounts for all of the text' to mean `makes sense of
all of the text as springing from a system of thought that we can
accept as rational and credible'. Any term that could be devised as
a substitute would be open to the same misinterpretation. That is
not the meaning of the phrase here, and the difference is crucial.
That does not, of course, mean that we should be satised with a
teleological exegesis that accounted for the text in the sense of
leaving no words or phrases unexplained or inadequately explained
but appeared to be the product of an irrational mind. That would
be acceptable if we had identied the text as nonsense of some sort,
or if we had reason to believe that the author was not rational, but
we have no reason to believe either that Paul thought to entertain
the Romans with something like The Hunting of the Snark or that
he was not rational. But that is another criterion. If we want to take
our text seriously as part of what Paul was intending to say to the
Romans, we shall be seeking an exegesis that accounts for all of the
text in the sense of leaving nothing unexplained.
We can state the difference another way. Wright demonstrates
that Romans is coherent by examining the theology and showing
that it represents a rational, intelligible and credible way of understanding certain issues.5 In the process, he dismembers the text. He
does not read it as a letter. Hays studies the narrative logic of Gal.
3.14.11 the same way.6 The test of the coherence of the text is the
coherence of the underlying thought structure. In the two-step
exegesis, that coherence is the concern of the causal reading. For
5
6
`The Messiah and the People of God'.

The Faith of Jesus Christ, chs. 4, 5.
43
the teleological reading, we seek to understand the text as coherent

communication. In doing so, we have to produce a reading in which
all the words and sentences are functioning in that communication.
This has an important implication for the teleological reading. At
that stage of our exegesis, we must concentrate only on the text in
hand. We do not understand what Paul was intending to say to the
Romans in Romans 4 by looking also at Galatians 3 and discussing
Abraham in Paul's thought. That, again, belongs to the causal
reading and to discussion of Paul's thought using the results of
exegesis as data. We may need to use the rest of the Pauline corpus,
including Galatians, to reconstruct the situation in which Paul was
addressing the Romans, but that is a different matter. This represents an enormous challenge to anybody trained in historicalcritical exegesis. We always read one text with part of our attention
on the others, and this is so much part of our reading that we are
rarely aware of it. It happens because of our interest in Paul's
thought. There is nothing wrong with doing this: in fact it is
necessary to a full exploration of the meaning of any one text. To
read the text as Paul's, we make comparisons only after we have
given our full attention to the one text and made sense of it on its
own terms as coherent communication.
A small example will help to explain this. In Rom. 2.111, there
are verses about judgement according to what a person has done.
These present no problem for a teleological reading. On the other
hand, they raise a vital question about Paul's thought. Is not that
inconsistent with justication by faith (sic)? In a teleological
reading, we trace through Paul's address to the Romans, and
Romans 2 accommodates the judgement material without stress.
On the other hand, Romans 2 itself presents a major problem to
current exegetical effort to understand Paul's thought. If our whole
teleological reading made nonsense, we should have to try again or
else conclude that Paul was inconsistent. If we demand at each
point as it arises that we can see the underlying consistency, it is
very difcult for us to be open to having our ideas challenged by
Paul's text. That is one reason why the apparently articial division
between teleological and causal reading is important.
5
H O W TO T R A C E W H A T P A U L W A S
INTENDING TO SAY TO THE ROMANS
In chapter 3, we proposed that the doctrine of justication is not

what Paul was intending to write about in Rom. 1.164.25, but a
theological presupposition of his intended discussion. Our examination in chapter 4 of what happens when we explore the meaning of
texts has shown why and how this proposal is possible. It has also
shown us that since we want to understand the text as Paul's, both
at the level of what he was intending to say to the Romans and at
the level of what it reveals about his thought, our rst task is to nd
out what he was intending to say to the Romans. This task has to
come rst because Paul's intention created the text and therefore
dened what kind of a whole it is what it is about and what kind
of discourse it is. Only when we understand that can we begin to
examine the theological presuppositions. They appeared in the text
as a by-product of the process of composition. Only when we can
see them in relation to Paul's intended discourse can we be reasonably condent that we are reading them correctly. The text itself
will provide some tests to assess our reading of what Paul was
intending to say. Thus, our whole exegesis will be subject to the text
Paul dictated.
Our rst task, then, is to develop a teleological reading, an
understanding of what Paul was intending to say to the Romans.
This will provide essential context for the causal reading, our
examination of theological presuppositions. To do this, we must
step aside from the mainstream debate on Romans, and ask some
different questions. We must rst do extensive work in the whole
sector of the hermeneutical circle, developing a new hypothesis on
what kind of text this is and what it is about. This will replace the
old assumption that we are reading theological exposition, a
justication account. When we move into the parts sector of the
hermeneutical circle we shall be working in the same area as the
mainstream debate, but with a different goal and a different basic
44
Tracing what Paul intended to say to the Romans
45
conception of the text. We shall be trying to understand what Paul

was intending to say to the Romans, not asking what the text
means. Because it must account for all of the text, this teleological
reading will look like a very full exegesis, but it will be awaiting
completion by the causal reading. The two stages of work for the
teleological reading involve six steps.
Step 1, chapter 6. We work from the problems of the mainstream
readings. We are testing an hypothesis that the justication account
is a reading of Paul's theological presuppositions and his intended
communication was about something else. The intended communication created the text and accounts for all of it. It also generated
the other elements of meaning genuinely present in the text. Since
we are accepting that the justication account represents meaning
genuinely present in the text, the intended communication must be
related to it. Study of the problems identied in chapter 2, then,
should point us towards a new hypothesis about Paul's intention.
Step 2, chapter 7. We formulate an hypothesis about Paul's
purpose. Since his intention created the text, an accurate idea of it
should give us a valuable key to the teleological reading. Our
passage is part of a longer letter, so we shall look at Paul's purpose
in the letter and then in this passage as part of it. We noticed in
chapter 4 that reading a text in contexts other than the original is
likely to distract readers from what the writer was intending to say
to the recipients. Our purpose study will be important in helping us
see the text in its original context.
Step 3, chapter 8. We formulate an hypothesis about the nature
of the text. This will help to awaken appropriate responses in us as
readers, so that we are better able to empathize with Paul's
intention and ask appropriate questions.
Step 4, chapter 9. We formulate a substantial hypothesis about
the nature of the whole we are reading. This will take the form of a
clear summary of what we have learnt so far. It will provide the
starting point and framework for the detailed teleological reading,
and it will help us to resist the pull of the old (unconscious and
therefore very powerful) assumptions about what we are reading.
Step 5, chapter 10. We develop a detailed teleological reading. In
this, the aim of our exegesis is to elucidate what Paul was intending
to say to the Romans. The questions we ask will arise not from the
agenda of the current debate, but from the hypothesis we have so
carefully developed. This reading will, of course, test our identication of the nature of the whole.
46
Step 6, chapter 11. We shall test the teleological reading before

we offer it as our best answer to the question of what Paul was
intending to say to the Romans and before we use it as the frame of
reference for our causal exegesis. We know already that it will have
to account for all of the text, although not for all of the meaning
that we can nd in it. Our study of the nature of the whole will
enable us to develop a full set of tests before we embark on the
teleological reading.
The process for nding out what Paul was intending to say to the
Romans is derived from our understanding of the way we in
practice encounter meaning in texts and our careful examination of
what it is we want to know.
After we have completed the six steps, we shall be ready to
complete our exegesis with the causal reading (chapter 12) and then
to review our whole enterprise (chapter 13).
6
W O R K I N G F R O M T H E P R O B L E M S OF
INTERPRETATION WITHIN THE
J U S T I FI C A T I O N F R A M E W O R K
We begin our search for what Paul was intending to say to the
Romans by examining the points where readings within the
justication framework do not account satisfactorily for the text.
Exegesis within that framework assumes that Rom. 1.1617 is the
theme statement, Rom. 1.183.20 presents the human predicament, Rom. 3.216 is the announcement of justication through
faith by grace, and Rom. 3.274.25 is about faith and the
continuity between God's action in Christ and God's earlier action
with Israel. In chapter 2, we identied three problems that cannot
be solved within this framework. They are so fundamental and so
closely interlocked as to question the validity of the framework.
(1) Rom. 1.183.20 is unlikely to convince an audience that all
have sinned. (2) As a justication account, Rom. 1.164.25 is out
of balance. The main point is not clearly developed, while
supporting arguments, essential but secondary, occupy over 90 per
cent of the text. (3) As the announcement of justication through
faith, Rom. 3.216 is out of balance, with grammar and meaning
that do not match.
We noted that these problems raise certain issues. These offer
starting points for the exploration in this chapter. Was Paul
talking to the Romans about something more limited than universal sin and salvation? Are the questions of relationships
between Jew and Gentile important to whatever that was? Is
Romans part of one of Paul's controversies rather than reection
on the theological bases and outcomes of earlier controversies?1
These questions raise the further question of what kind of
discourse this is.
1
The latter is suggested by Manson (`St. Paul's Letter to the Romans and
Others', esp. 1415) and Bornkamm (`Testament', 278).
47
48

Paq in Rom. 1.164.25
In Rom. 3.23, panteq gar h%marton focusses two problems, the

question of universality and the apparent disjunction between
Paul's grammar and his meaning. In the justication account readings, àll have sinned' is both a summary or delayed conclusion of
the argument of Rom. 1.183.20 and the statement of the need for
the grace of Rom. 3.24. We questioned whether this paq refers to all
humankind. We might ask, Who, then, is meant by paq? In seeking
to discover what Paul was intending to say to the Romans, we ask
instead, What was Paul intending to say to the Romans with this
paq?
First we must clear the ground. We have always read Rom.
1.164.25 on the assumption that it is a particular kind of
argument, theological exposition. Reading thus, we nd it hard to
see how paq could be referring to anything other than all humankind. For this study, we have set aside the presupposition that the
passage is theological exposition. Being stitched together with the
connectives of logical talk, the text appears as argument of some
kind, or at least as discourse with a thread of argument running
through it. Having key terms that are theological salvation, sin,
judgement, grace, righteousness it appears as theological. The
most vulnerable element of our old view seems to be èxposition'.
That is interesting, in view of the fact that we have raised the
possibility that Romans might be part of one of Paul's controversies.
Some examples show that paq often has a more limited reference
than to every human being: Èverybody (all human beings) needs
oxygen to live.' This is a universal use. A speaker with an unreliable
microphone will say, `Can everybody (all of you) hear me?' This
reference is universal within a limit. It refers to all the people in the
auditorium. Somebody planning a dinner party might say, `Let's
have a roast. Everybody (all people) likes roast beef.' There are
millions of vegetarians and probably some others who dislike roast
beef, yet a normal listener will not want to correct this speaker.
This is a different kind of discourse, and we do not apply the strict
standards of logic and consistency that we apply in the rst case.
With this èverybody', the speaker is really saying, `With roast beef,
we shall not be taking the risk that a number of guests might not
enjoy the meal.' When somebody in trouble insists stoically on
being self-sufcient, a friend may say, Èverybody (all people)
Problems with the justication framework
49
needs help sometime.' In logical terms, this is a universal statement.

With this èverybody', however, the friend is saying something like,
Èverybody includes you. It is not good to try to be superhuman in
these situations. Please accept some help.' What the friend intends
to say to that particular person depends on the fact that the
statement is generally true, and the person can be expected to take
it as true. The focus of both speaker's and hearer's attention,
however, is on the hearer, not on the general statement. Indeed, the
intention would not be undermined if there were a few exceptions
to the general statement. On the other hand, if we found two
human beings who did not need oxygen to live, we should ask
serious questions. Different kinds of discourse can make different
uses of àll'.
What was Paul intending to say with the reiterated paq of his
address to the Romans? According to the grammatical structure of
Rom. 3.216, panteq gar h%marton (Rom. 3.23a) is part of the
grounding for oy! gar e!stin diastolh (Rom. 3.22d). The full
grounding is tripartite. Dependent on panteq are h%marton,
y"steroyntai thq dojhq toy ueoy and dikaioymenoi dvrean.
Among whom is there no distinction in these three respects? Rom.
3.22 is referring to believers in Christ. There is no distinction
among believers in Christ, as sinners or as justied.
When we see the panteq of Rom. 3.23 saying something like àll
believers without distinction' rather than èvery human being', our
attention is directed to two features of Rom. 1.183.20. There is no
reference there to the people under discussion being believers. This
would suggest that it is not a grounding for Rom. 3.23, or at least
not in the way we have always supposed. On the other hand, there
is a distinction running, and it often appears in connection with
paq. In Rom. 2.910, punishment and reward are e!pi pasan cyxhn
a!nurvpoy toy katergazomenoy to kakon, ! Ioydaioy te prvton
kai % Ellhnoq and panti tCv e!rgazomenCv to a!gauon, ! IoydaiCv te
prvton kai % Ellhni. This pattern is immediately picked up in
Rom. 2.1213, with o%soi, where the equal treatment of sinners is
spelt out in terms of those without the law and those under the law.
In Rom. 3.9, everybody, Jew and Greek, is under sin. In Rom.
3.10b12, 18, there seem to be universal statements with no
reference to any distinction, panteq and oy!k estin. These belong to
the scripture catena, which is applied in Rom. 3.1920: o%sa o"
nomoq legei toiq e!n tCv nomCv lalei. We argued in chapter 2 that
toiq e!n tCv nomCv refers to Jews. The universal statements apply to
50
the whole of the group to whom they refer. The scripture condemnation of them means that every mouth may be stopped and the
whole world arraigned before God. On the basis of denition of
terms, this must add Jew to Gentile, with the Gentiles' situation
being taken for granted in this verse. Then in Rom. 3.20a, the
totally exclusive e!j ergvn nomoy oy! dikaivuhsetai pasa sarj has
the effect of excluding all Israel. The conclusion drawn from the
catena includes a stress on `Jew just like Gentile'.
The pattern we have been tracing identies the distinction that
would be in Paul's and the Romans' minds when distinction is
excluded in Rom. 3.223. The pattern and that link make
excellent sense of the fact that in Rom. 1.16b panti tCv pisteyonti
is qualied with ! IoydaiCv te prvton kai % Ellhni. The distinction
would become a key issue in what Paul was intending to say to
the Romans. In that case, the elements in Rom. 3.274.25 that
deal with the distinction would be critical. There are two: the
minimizing of the distinction where justication is concerned, for
example, Rom. 3.2930; 4.1316, and the question of the relationship between God's action with Israel and God's new action in
Christ.
In each of these cases, paq is associated with Jew and Gentile. We
might almost say that àll' is made up of Jew and Gentile. There are
other uses, though. The uses of paq in Rom. 1.29 and Rom. 3.2 are
clearly not evidence for our question, since they do not refer to
people, and in Rom. 2.1 the term is part of the address to the
interlocutor. Rom. 1.18 and Rom. 3.4, however, look like universal
statements and are often taken as parts of Paul's argument for
universal sinfulness. In fact, once we give up the presupposition
that Paul was trying to establish that all have sinned, we are freed
to attend to what he actually said. The paq of Rom. 3.4 is part of a
discussion of God's faithfulness to Israel in the face of Israel's
unfaithfulness. It extends the tineq of Rom. 3.3, and the terms refer
to some of and all of Israel.
Exegesis which treats Rom. 1.18 as referring to Gentiles thereby
excludes it from the category of universal statements. Traditional
exegesis, however, often treats Rom. 1.1832 as though Rom. 1.18
is a universal statement, with God's wrath revealed e!pi a!sebeian
kai a!dikian pantvn a!nurvpvn. Paul's text reads e!pi pasan
a!sebeian kai a!dikian a!nurvpvn tvn thn a!lhueian e!n a!dikiAa
katexontvn. It does not say that God's wrath is revealed against
all human beings, or even that it is revealed against the ungodliness
51
and wickedness of all human beings.2 It says that God's wrath is

revealed against all ungodliness and wickedness of a particular
category of human beings, those who by or in wickedness suppress
the truth. The text does not tell us whether Paul thought that group
was co-extensive with humankind. That is a question for the causal
reading. Thus, these two uses of paq do not count against the
pattern we have observed. That pattern is that when àll' might
refer to the whole human race, the stress is rather on àll'
comprising Jew and Gentile. Both Rom. 3.4 and Rom. 1.18
concern some other àll', Israel in the one case and ungodliness and
wickedness of a specic group in the other.
These observations suggest the hypothesis that what Paul was
intending to say to the Romans with the reiterated paq was something like àll, without distinction between Jew and Gentile'. This
points in the same general direction as Dunn's and Ziesler's
exegeses, both of which seem to have Paul showing in Rom.
1.183.20 that Jews are just as sinful as Gentiles. It coheres with
the current recognition that the JewGentile question is more
important for Romans than it seems in older exegesis, where it
appears as a cultural distinction controlling the way the theology is
presented. Universal sinfulness, for instance, had to be demonstrated separately for Jew and Gentile.
Our observations leave us with some questions. While there is
reason to believe that Paul's address ows continuously through
the whole of Rom. 1.164.25, we now have paq in Rom. 3.223
referring to all believers, but no reason to believe that paq in Rom.
1.183.20 does the same. So far, we have identied it as meaning
àll, Jew and Gentile'. We shall need to nd the connection. In each
case, paq is connected with sin, judgement or both.
The goal of the discussion in Rom. 1.183.20
The study so far encourages us to proceed with our hypothesis that
in Rom. 1.183.20 Paul may not have been trying to convince his
audience that all (meaning all human beings) have sinned. One
reason for doubting this is that we nd in the text neither proof nor
convincing rhetoric to demonstrate that they have. We have now
discovered that the emphasis of any paq in the passage that might
2
The universal reference is more often assumed than discussed. Schlier (Der
Romerbrief, 51) suggests that the lack of the article makes a!nurwpvn refer to
humanity in general.
52
refer to all human beings is on Jew and Gentile, rather than on the
universal reference of paq. We now look at the passages that have
traditionally been interpreted as contributing to the demonstration
that all have sinned. These are Rom. 1.1832; 2.13; 2.1724; 3.9b;
3.1020. We ask whether they add up to an unsatisfactory attempt
to do what we thought Paul was doing, or whether there are
indications that he may have intended to do something else.
Does Rom. 1.1832 offer any demonstration that all human
beings or all Gentiles have sinned? Once we realize that Rom. 1.18
refers to a specic group of human beings, the answer is that it does
not. Paul opened the pericope with the proclamation of the revelation of the wrath of God on all the evil of people who by or in
wickedness suppress the truth. How did he develop this? An
overview of the passage invites us to seek an answer by studying the
expressions that are ways of saying `because' and `therefore'. The
rst of these is dioti in Rom. 1.19. God's wrath is revealed upon
the actions of these people because God made himself known to
them ei! q to ei(nai ay!toyq a!napologhtoyq (Rom. 1.20b). That is, he
made himself known to them either with the result that they are, or
in order that they might be, without excuse. In either case, the
wrath is revealed because they are without excuse in the face of
God's self-revelation.
Dioti in Rom. 1.21 indicates that they are without excuse
because knowing God they did not honour him as God or give him
thanks. Rom. 1.21b23 explicates this sin, the passive verbs of
Rom. 1.21b indicating already that it carried its punishment from
God within itself. This explains the way the refusal of honour and
thanksgiving is closely linked with the disabling of minds and
hearts.
Based on this situation is dio in Rom. 1.245. This is the rst of
three explicit statements of God's punishment, paredvken ay!toyq
o" ueoq. Because of what they had done, therefore God gave them
up to what they had made of themselves. In content and vocabulary, Rom. 1.25 harks back to Rom. 1.23. It also provides the
ground for dia toyto in Rom. 1.267. Again, the punishment is
that God gave them up, and again it is to what they had made of
themselves. With the exchange motif and the account of sexual
immorality, this links back to the reference to idolatry in Rom.
1.25. The kai kauvq that opens Rom. 1.2831 is the next `therefore', and the same punishment is pronounced, this time directly on
the refusal to acknowledge God. In each of the three cases, an
53
oppressive weight of sin is pictured. Rom. 1.32 offers a climax. The

people who by or in wickedness suppress the truth do all these
things in deance of their knowledge that God's judgement is that
those who do or approve such things are worthy of death.
This outline is nothing more than an attempt to trace through a
sequence that is clear in the text. It shows that the rst point Paul
made in developing the announcement of the wrath of God was
that it was revealed upon people who were without excuse. The
inexcusable refusal to acknowledge God was itself ungodly and
unrighteous. It is also shown as leading to ungodly and wicked
actions. These sinful acts arose from the punishment for the
original sin, that God gave them up to what they had made of
themselves. This again stresses their responsibility for their sins,
responsibility reiterated in the statement that they act and think
deance of God's known ordinance (Rom. 1.32). This approach
suggests that ei! q to ei(nai ay!toyq a!napologhtoyq at least includes
within its meaning the idea that God's judgement of wrath is
righteous, and that this idea is important in the discussion. In the
passage, there is no attempt to prove that anybody has sinned,
simply a statement of their sin. Sin is a datum and the passage is
about God's just judgement of wrath. Sinful acts ow from God's
punishment of the root sin, and also place responsible sinners
under the judgement ajioi uanatoy (Rom. 1.32a).
This line of thought continues in Rom. 2.1, with the charge dio
a!napologhtoq ei( against the judge who does `the same things'. Dio
in Rom. 2.1 indicates a direct connection. This time, the charge of
being without excuse leads to a discussion of God's judgement
(Rom. 2.511), with the judge who does `the same things' storing
up wrath for himself. There God's wrath is clearly presented as just.
In that the diatribe partner is accused of doing `the same things',
Rom. 2.13 does talk about sin. As exegetes have long noticed,
Paul stated this apparently unreasonable charge without offering
either evidence or argument to support it. We notice that he made
it the basis of the warning that anybody who does such things is
storing up wrath for the day of God's righteous judgement.
Rom. 2.1724 is about Jews. It mentions Jewish sins, but offers
no argument that all Jews were guilty of theft, adultery or temple
robbery, or even any argument that all Jews broke the law. The
questions about specic sins build towards the conclusion that Jews
who boast in the law dishonour God by their law-breaking. This
point is given the emphatic nal position and the scripture proof. It
54
contrasts sharply with the picture of Jewish identity in Rom.

2.1720.
In Rom. 3.1020, the scripture `proof ' that all have sinned is
applied to show that the law places the Jews to whom it was given
before God's judgement, just like the Gentiles. Rom. 3.20 then
becomes a comment about the law, applicable to Jews, not to
everybody.
While this review does not lead to rm conclusions, it does show
a pattern in the passages. In each, Paul took it for granted that the
people had sinned and made some other point on this basis. In
Rom. 1.1832, the sin is the cause and result of being given up by
God, and it places sinners without excuse under the judgement
ajioi uanatoy (Rom. 1.32a). In Rom. 2.111 it is the basis for a
warning about not expecting special treatment at the judgement. In
Rom. 2.1724 it is part of the basis for a charge of dishonouring
God. In Rom. 3.1020 it is the basis for saying that the law places
Jew with Gentile before God's judgement. Rom. 3.9 is a more
isolated text, but it represents the same pattern. However we
understand proexomeua and oy! pantvq, there is a question about a
difference between people. The answer is a negative one based on
the charge that all, Jew and Greek, are under sin. That is, the
statement about being under sin is the ground for whatever the
point of this mysterious text is.
Listing the conclusions, we notice that three of the ve have to
do with God's judgement. Is this signicant? Since we have set
aside the justication reading, we have insufcient context to
investigate Rom. 3.9 any further at present. The treatment of the
Jew in Rom. 2.1724 continues in Rom. 2.259. There the true Jew
and true circumcision are known only to God. We recall that our
examination of the use of paq led to the observation that judgement
is important in that context. Further, the whole section concludes
with Jew and Gentile before God's judgement. This gives ground
for a proposal that judgement may well be signicant in what Paul
was intending to communicate in Rom. 1.183.20.
This pattern of sin as factual basis for some other conclusion
strongly reinforces our hypothesis that Paul was not trying to
demonstrate that all human beings are sinners. With paq, he seems
to have been making a point about àll' including Jew and Gentile.
In the text he was not concerned to dene the limits of the àll',
although pan stoma and paq o" kosmoq indicate that in Rom. 3.19 it
does cover all human beings. The fact of sin is not even part of the
55
goal of what Paul was saying. It is a presupposition of what he was

saying, which apparently had something to do with God's righteous
judgement on Jew and Gentile. These conclusions raise to urgency
the questions of what kind of discourse this is and to whom it was
addressed.
The audience
Concerning the nature of the discourse, we observe that the way
Paul was using paq strongly encourages our suspicion that this is
not theological exposition. Among our samples of uses of àll'/
èverybody', the one most like the pattern we have been discovering
is the address to the friend in trouble: the point of the generally true
statement is that it is signicant for the person addressed. That is
the speaker's concern. The general statement as such is not being
given attention. That is a possible model for understanding paq
here. If it proved to be the appropriate one, it would revolutionize
our reading, since it would demand responses very different from
those activated by the theological exposition model (in which the
use of paq corresponds with the example about all human beings
needing oxygen). It would require a reading with constant, careful
attention to audience.
We know that Paul's audience was the Romans, but we need to
rene that. Our exploration raises one immediate question. Could
Paul reasonably have taken it for granted that the Roman believers
would accept a presupposition that people, or the people he was
talking about, were sinners? In favour of this is his cryptic reference
to the Atonement (Rom. 3.24b25a). Its brevity would be explained if we found that he was directing the Romans to something
they knew already and would not need explained. Believers believed
in Christ as the one whom God set forth to deal with their sins.
" Ilasthrion certainly refers to a way of dealing with sin and its
effects. This coheres with Paul's starting point for the Resurrection
argument in 1 Cor. 15: whoever preached the gospel declared that
Christ died for our sins, was buried, was raised on the third day,
and was seen by witnesses (1 Cor. 15.35). 1Thess. 1.9b10 and
Acts 17.31 show the pattern of salvation from the wrath to come.
Thus, we have some evidence that Paul could have assumed that
the Romans would accept sin as a datum in this way, and stronger
evidence that he was making the assumption, reasonably or not.
That is good reason to accept into our hypothesis the idea that
56
what Paul was intending to say to the Romans presupposed that

the people he was talking about were sinners. Hypotheses are for
testing.
The balance and grammar of Rom. 3.216
Our investigation of Rom. 3.23 led to exploration of Rom.
1.183.20. We now return to dikaioymenoi (Rom. 3.24a). Craneld
summarizes the problems of the relation of verse 24 to its context:
The difculty of the explanation which lies nearest to hand,
namely, that dikaioymenoi is dependent on the panteq of v.
23, is that, on this view, what seems to be a substantial
contribution to the thought of the paragraph as a whole (if
o%n in v. 25 is understood as introducing an ordinary relative
clause, it actually includes the whole of vv. 2426) is
formally part of the explanation of oy! gar e!stin diastolh,
which itself supports the pantaq of v. 22a.3
We examined this in chapter 2. The grammar works only if panteq
(Rom. 3.23) refers to the same group as pantaq (Rom. 3.22). This
problem disappeared when we examined panteq (Rom. 3.23)
without assuming that Paul was giving a justication account. It is
believers, and only believers, among whom there is no distinction in
the three respects listed.
The other problem is the role of oy! gar e!stin diastolh in the
paragraph. According to the grammar, all of Rom. 3.236 is an
explanation of oy! gar e!stin diastolh (Rom. 3.22d). If we accept
that Paul meant what he said, the paragraph looks different. Since
oy! gar e!stin diastolh has this key role, the stress in Rom. 3.22 is
different. In traditional readings, the key phrase is dia pistevq
! Ihsoy Xristoy. Ei! q pantaq toyq pisteyontaq simply underlines
that. When oy! gar e!stin diastolh has its major role in the
paragraph, the key phrase in Rom. 3.22 is ei! q pantaq toyq
pisteyontaq. The point at issue is not believing in Christ, but all
believers in Christ. This is consistent with observations we have
made already. If it is correct, we shall need to reread Rom. 3.212.
How does the rest of the paragraph look as an explanation of oy!
gar e!stin diastolh? First, Paul listed the three respects in which
there was no distinction. Next, he rehearsed briey how àll' were
3
Romans, I, 205.
57
being justied freely. It was by God's grace, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth (purposed?) as
i" lasthrion (expiation? propitiation? Mercy Seat?) through faith,
by (in?) his blood. Then he explained why God did it in this way. It
was for the demonstration of God's righteousness in two respects,
and so that he might be righteous. We have noticed already that the
second step is too brief to be a clear Atonement account, and have
suggested that Paul was referring the Romans to something they
already knew. The structure of the paragraph suggests that Paul
was referring them to what they knew for the sake of what he
wanted to say about it, namely, why God was justifying people in
this way in order to be seen to be righteous and to be righteous.
This would account for the fact that 37.4 per cent of Rom. 3.216
deals directly with the question of God's righteousness.
A question about God's righteousness
This evidence suggests that we are looking at theodicy. Paul was
facing a question about whether God was indeed righteous. The
key role in the passage of oy! gar e!stin diastolh suggests that the
question was about God justifying believers without distinction,
that is, without distinguishing between Jewish and Gentile believers. Although we are not used to the question in this form, we
recognize a major issue of Paul's ministry, a question that research
suggests the Romans were facing, the relationship between Jew and
Gentile in the church.
This way of looking at the text casts light on two other problems.
The kai of ei! q to ei(nai ay!ton dikaion kai dikaioynta ton e!k
pistevq ! Ihsoy (Rom. 3.26b) is usually translated ànd'. This is so
awkward that Kasemann goes to the length of suggesting liturgical
parallels.4 Èven' is more natural to the construction, yet few
participants in the mainstream debate believe that a good argument
can be made for this. In the context we are now hypothesizing, it is
natural to the meaning as well as to the construction God acts in
order to be righteous even in justifying on the basis of faith. Èven'
has a note of surprise about it.5 The expectation is that that would
be unrighteous, but God has acted so that it is righteous. Ton e!k
pistevq ! Ihsoy describes the person with reference to faith. There
4
5
Commentary on Romans, 100.

BAGD, kai, I.2.g.
58
is no other criterion of judgement. The second problem is the role

of Rom. 3.18, which often appears to be an aside. It also is
concerned largely with the question of God's righteousness, and the
question arises because at that point there seems to be no place left
for Israel (Rom. 3.1; cf. Rom. 2.259). Rom. 3.18 and Rom.
3.216 both deal with God's righteousness as faithfulness to
election and as justice in judgement. We recall the other points
about God's righteous wrath and judgement in Rom. 1.183.20.
This may be a key concern of the whole passage. If we nd it to be
so, Rom. 3.18 will probably not appear as a digression. These
observations do not account for the charge of encouraging sin in
Rom. 3.78. Our hypothesis will need to open up a reading of the
passage which includes that.
We have been examining Rom. 3.236 on the basis that according
to the grammar the whole depends on oy! gar e!stin diastolh.
Craneld qualied this, saying that it is true if the o%n of Rom. 3.25 is
introducing an ordinary relative clause. Presumably, he was alluding
to the proposal that Paul used a pre-Pauline formula. This proposal
arises primarily from the difculties of reading the text within the
justication framework, and the variety of reconstructions of the
original formula does not encourage condence in it. While it is
possible that Paul was alluding to a traditional formulation he
expected the Romans to recognize, the proposal is not necessary to
our hypothesis so far, and the arguments for it are not strong enough
to impose it at this stage of our investigation.
Summary: clues and questions towards a new hypothesis
Here we review our investigation so far. Setting aside the presupposition that Paul was giving a justication account, we are using the
difculties of reading Rom. 1.164.25 on that presupposition to
help direct our attention to what he was actually saying. We have
found the following:
In Rom. 3.22d24a, paq refers to all believers, with the
emphasis on all without distinction. Examination of paq in
Rom. 1.183.20 showed a persistent reference to Jew and
Gentile, with Rom. 3.19 adding Jew to Gentile as sinners
before God. This distinction would therefore be in the
minds of Paul and his audience when distinction was
excluded in Rom. 3.22.
59
Whereas it is clear that in Rom. 3.22d24a the reference of

paq is to all believers, in Rom. 1.183.20 the focus is on
Jew and Gentile, with no concern to dene the limits of the
àll' except in Rom. 3.19, where the reference is to all
humanity.
In Rom. 1.183.20, none of the passages traditionally
taken as contributing to the demonstration that all have
sinned has that function. Sins are data, the basis for
making some other point. This suggests that Paul was
presupposing that all the people concerned had sinned, and
was arguing from this. There is evidence to suggest that he
was intending to talk about God's judgement.
The unsatisfactory Atonement account in Rom. 3.24b25a
is explained if Paul was not offering an explanation of the
Atonement, but referring the Romans to something they
already knew. They believed in Christ as one who died for
their sins. With other NT evidence, this suggests that Paul
could reasonably have spoken to the Romans on the
presupposition that all the people he was talking about
were sinners.
If we follow the grammar and the balance of elements in
the pericope, Rom. 3.216 seems to move towards the
conclusion that God acted in the Cross in order to be seen
to be righteous and to be righteous even in justifying
believers in Jesus. Given the role of oy! gar e!stin diastolh,
this implies that there was a question about God's righteousness if God justied all believers without reference to
the JewGentile distinction. This reading gives kai in Rom.
3.26 its proper weight. It allows the possibility that Paul
was referring the Romans to what they knew about how
God justied for the sake of what he wanted to say about
why God did it that way.
This reading of the thrust of Rom. 3.216 offers the
possibility of accounting for Rom. 3.18, a problem in
many traditional readings.
Following the grammar moves the emphasis in Rom. 3.22
from dia pistevq ! Ihsoy Xristoy onto ei! q pantaq toyq
pisteyontaq. This would involve a rereading of Rom.
3.212.
60
Our examination raised some major questions for consideration in

formulating a new hypothesis about what Paul was intending to
talk about and in what kind of discourse.
The fact of sin was a presupposition, not the goal, of what
Paul was saying in Rom. 1.183.20. What was the goal?
We have two clues. There is a clear concern with Jew and
Gentile in Paul's paq. The conclusions drawn from the fact
of sin include a strong element of judgement. The Jew
Gentile concern connects with our observations about
Rom. 3.216, and we know it was a major concern for
Paul and the church of his day.
The question of the nature of the discourse is looming
large. We found one clue. Paul's use of paq in Rom.
1.183.20 looks like the usage where the truth of a general
statement is being taken for granted and the statement is
intended to say something in particular to the addressee.
Such discourse would be very demanding for us to read.
We need to develop a clearer view of the audience Paul was
intending to address than simply that they were the
believers in Rome.
We need a new understanding of Rom. 3.212.
In this investigation, we are using the problems of reading Rom.
1.164.25 within the justication framework to help us nd the
starting point of a new hypothesis about the whole. We started
from three problems that we have argued are insoluble within the
old framework. We now have evidence that Paul's intention in
Rom. 1.183.20 was not to convince his audience that all have
sinned. Reading Rom. 3.216 on the assumption that the grammar
and meaning do match went some way towards making sense of the
balance of elements in that pericope. We have not drawn even a
tentative conclusion about the balance of elements in the whole
passage. We have not drawn any conclusions about law-fullling
Gentiles (Rom. 2.14, 26, 27). Since we have concluded that the
context is not an argument that all have sinned, there is no question
of how they can be seen to be consistent with such a conclusion. On
the other hand, we have not found a way of seeing them as
consistent with the references to èvery mouth' and `the whole
world' in Rom. 3.19. This points us again to the questions of Paul's
purpose in this section, and of the nature of the discourse.
61
A major outstanding problem is the role of the law. In older

exegesis, it was understood to have been misused as a means of
trying to earn justication. In the light of recent research, stress has
been put instead on its role as a boundary marker between Jews
and Gentiles. Law references in the passage are in four groups. In
Rom. 2.1229 it is a criterion of judgement. It is an ambiguous
criterion, in that it seems that all people are to be judged according
to whether or not they did what the law requires, but the law itself
is the criterion only for Jews. In Rom. 3.1920, the law condemns
as sinners those who come under it, the Jews, and brings knowledge
of sin. Rom. 3.21 refers to a revelation of the dikaiosynh ueoy
apart from the law and to which the law bears witness. This is
paralleled in Rom. 3.2731, where justication is by faith and not
works of the law, and the law is established by this. In Rom.
4.1316, promise and faith are set over against law, with an
emphasis on the promise to the seed of Abraham, e!k toy nomoy and
e!k pistevq (Rom. 4.16b). These observations do not lead to a
conclusion about the role of the law, but it is involved with the
JewGentile distinction, and with the continuity between God's
action in Christ and his former action with Israel. Here we have
another question about Rom. 1.183.20 that has led us to the
theme of judgement.
Hypothesis about Rom. 1.164.25
We can now formulate an hypothesis that Paul was intending to
talk to the Romans about a particular problem. It seemed that
God's righteousness was put in question if justication of sinners
was simply on the basis of faith in Christ without distinction
between Jew and Gentile. On that hypothesis, the JewGentile
distinction will be a major issue. This is consistent with its
appearance in Rom. 1.16, with the fact that àll' in Rom. 1.183.20
seems to be made up of Jew and Gentile, and with the theme in
Rom. 3.274.25 of the continuity between God's action in Christ
and God's former action with Israel. It seems to provide the eld of
reference for understanding the role of the law in the passage. It
also opens up the possibility of a reading that would correct a
signicant problem of the traditional readings, namely that both
the passage as a whole and Rom. 3.216 are out of balance. This
hypothesis should help us with the question of Paul's audience. He
was dealing with the problem that God's righteousness seemed to
62
be put in question when the JewGentile distinction was overridden. How would that problem arise? For whom was it a
problem? For whom in Rome? What kind of a problem was it for
them? It seems obvious that it would have been a theological
problem, but did it have other dimensions as well?
We can also formulate some questions to consider in developing
the hypothesis.
The role of Rom. 1.183.20 is a major question. We have
several strands of evidence suggesting that it is concerned
with God's judgement. This reminds us that a major use of
the dikai-vocabulary, and therefore a signicant element of
its meaning, is juridical. That may point us to the connection with Rom. 3.216.
We should formulate Paul's purpose more precisely. Since
his purpose created the text, this question is likely to
interact with the questions of the audience he intended to
address and of the nature of his discourse.
The hypothesis demands a new reading of Rom. 3.212. If
the JewGentile distinction and God's righteousness are
interlocking central questions, Rom. 1.1617 is also going
to look different. In particular, the hypothesis that Paul's
main concern was with God's righteousness raises the
possibility that dikaiosynh ueoy may have more to do
with God's own righteousness than is usually supposed.
In one fundamental respect this hypothesis reverses the traditional
readings. When the passage is read as a justication account, the
concern is with how sinful human beings can be righteous in God's
sight, and justication by grace through faith is the solution. On
our hypothesis, the concern is with how God can be righteous in
the sight of whatever human beings Paul was considering, and
justication by grace through faith is the problem, or part of it. The
traditional readings are anthropocentric. Our hypothesis suggests
that to understand what Paul intended to say to the Romans we
need to read theocentrically. We are reminded of Bultmann's
dictum that in Paul's writing `[e]very assertion about God is
simultaneously an assertion about man and vice versa'.6
6
Theology of the New Testament, I, 191.
7
P A U L' S P U R P O S E I N C R E A T I N G T H E T E X T
The second step in our search for what Paul was intending to say to
the Romans in Rom. 1.164.25 is to identify as precisely as possible
his purpose in writing. This will help us to see the text in its original
context, so that our attention is directed to those elements of its
meaning that are what he intended to say. It will help us to develop
empathy with the nature of the text, so that we respond appropriately. It is important for developing a reading that will account
for all of the text.
Our question is, What response was Paul trying to elicit from the
audience he was addressing in Rom. 1.164.25? We shall try to
discover what response he was seeking with the letter as a whole,
and then consider how his purpose in our passage contributes to it.
Did he want his hearers to understand and approve his theology?
To give him help? To be guided in handling a problem of their
own? Something else altogether? Our work in this chapter is limited
by the fact that we have not yet identied the audience or the
nature of the text, but by the time we are ready for the detailed
teleological reading, we shall have a working hypothesis about
Paul's purpose.
We are asking what response Paul was trying to elicit from the
people he was addressing. At its best, the normal purpose question
in the mainstream debate is, Why did Paul write this letter to these
people at this time? The difference between these two purpose
questions is important. Our What response . . .? question arises
from the demands of the teleological reading, the attempt to
identify what Paul hoped the Romans would hear when the letter
was read to them. The Why . . .? question lends itself to turning
purpose into a sub-set of cause. This shows in titles like À
Convergence of Motivations'1 and The Reasons for Romans. The
1
Beker, Paul the Apostle, 71.
63
64
purpose question is then drawn into the preference for causal

explanation, and contributes to a reading of the text as expression
of Paul's thought.
As evidence for an answer to our question, we have the letter
itself and information about Paul, the Romans, and the situation
and problems of the tiny churches not yet labelled `Christianity'.
One of our major problems in trying to enter into the situation is
that Romans belongs to the period when Christianity was not yet
established as separate from Judaism.
We begin with the letter, accepting that it is one letter. Gamble's
argument that chapter 16 is part of the letter is persuasive,2 and
none of the redaction theories explains why someone would put
pieces together less than coherently.
The letter is not the same evidence for us as it is for the rest of the
debate. It is clearly a letter, with the frame well enough marked:
greeting Rom. 1.17, thanksgiving section beginning at Rom. 1.8
and merging into the letter body by Rom. 1.17, concluding requests
and courtesies Rom. 15.1416.27. For the mainstream debate, the
problem arises from the letter body, 10.5 chapters of theological
exposition and a paraenetic section: the long theological exposition
is not a comprehensive account of the gospel or of Paul's theology,
but neither does it appear to be treating a specic issue. For us, the
problem is different. In questioning the assumption that Rom.
1.164.25 is theological exposition, we have placed the same
question over Romans 511, and the answer need not be the same
for all the material. We are not sure what kind of a letter we are
reading. Further, we have developed an hypothesis that Rom.
1.164.25 is not about how believers are justied but about how
God can be righteous in justifying believers without distinguishing
between Jew and Gentile. Mainstream readings of Romans 511
could be equally astray. Accordingly, we can make only limited
observations about the content of the letter. Within these constraints, what evidence can we derive from the letter?
Paul made one direct statement about his purpose: tolmhroteron de egraca y"min a!po meroyq v"q e!panamimnBhskvn y"maq dia
thn xarin thn doueisan moi y"po toy ueoy ei! q to ei(nai me
leitoyrgon Xristoy ! Ihsoy ei! q ta eunh, i" eroyrgoynta to ey!aggelion toy ueoy, i% na genhtai h" prosfora tvn e!unvn ey!prosdektoq, h"giasmenh e!n pneymati a"giCv (Rom. 15.1516). One
2
The Textual History of the Letter to the Romans, 6595.
65
purpose was to remind the Romans. Of what? To what end? We are

accustomed to thinking of the letter in terms of problems needing
solutions, and we have identied a substantial problem in Rom.
1.164.25. Nevertheless, the letter can be seen to be full of
reminders of familiar things such as the Cross, the church's
experience of the Spirit, God's faithfulness, teaching about the way
believers should live. Whether simply as reminders or helping to
solve problems, these would serve the end he mentions, carrying
out the ministry God gave him so that the offering of the Gentiles
would be acceptable. It seems that Paul wanted to remind his
hearers of the gospel and of proper responses to God's grace so
that their life in Christ would be enriched, to be part of an
acceptable offering to God.
We can gather some information from the letter frame. The
occasion of the letter was Paul's expectation that at last he would
be able to visit Rome (Rom. 15.224). The letter would therefore
serve to some extent as a self-introduction, since he knew few of the
Romans. Paul included some requests: a hope for an hospitable
reception and support for the Spanish mission (Rom. 15.24), and
requests for hospitality for Phoebe (Rom. 16.12) and for intercession for the Jerusalem visit (Rom. 15.302). One of the responses
he was seeking must have been action on these requests, but it is
hard to see that as his whole or main purpose in writing. If it were,
we should expect the requests to be linked much more explicitly to
the body of the letter.
Two linked concerns dominate the letter frame, the gospel and
Paul's calling as apostle to the Gentiles. In this connection, we note
his tone of authority, which is reected in the body of the letter (for
example Rom. 6.1223; 11.1724; 12.115.6). He was talking
about being apostle to the Gentiles and therefore to the Romans
(Rom. 1.56, 1415; 15.1421), and he was speaking as apostle to
the Gentiles, though careful to avoid any suggestion of interference
or lording it over their faith (Rom. 1.1113; 15.1415). Scholars of
epistolography note that the thanksgiving often gives an indication
of the purpose of a letter,3 so the interlocking themes of visit,
gospel and apostleship to the Gentiles may be signicant for
identifying Paul's purpose.
We move now to the letter body, the part where we move farthest
3
e.g. White, `Saint Paul and the Apostolic Letter Tradition', 438; Fitzmyer, `New
Testament Epistles', 224.
66
from the mainstream debate. We can agree with the identication

of Rom. 12.115.6 as a paraenetic section, on the basis of the
imperatives and the content. Chapters 12 and 13 appear to be
mainly general instruction, appropriate to most Christian congregations, although we may suspect that some elements would be
particularly relevant here. Rom. 14.115.6 is often seen as treating
a Roman problem, but scholars cannot agree on the problem.
Close examination of the text suggests that this is because Paul was
more concerned with the principles for dealing with such problems
than with the particular problem. His main concern is with not
usurping God's judgement, with considering one another, with
following Christ's example. Their attitudes to food and holy days
allow people to consider themselves strong or weak, but what
follows from being strong or weak is the way to treat other
believers, not the solution to problems about food and holy days. I
suggest, therefore, that Paul was showing with this example how
believers should deal with such problems. That raises the question
of why these problems warranted more detailed attention than
other issues in this section.
Rom. 15.713 is a conclusion. The injunction to welcome one
another is directed to Jews and Gentiles. Its importance is marked
by the grounding in Christ and in four different scripture quotations. Is it a conclusion to the discussion of ritual observance,
which has the injunction to welcome but no explicit mention of Jew
and Gentile, or is it a conclusion to something more, perhaps the
whole letter body, which does raise JewGentile issues?
In the chapters usually seen as theological exposition, we can say
with some condence that Romans 911 is a clearly demarcated
discussion of Israel's unbelief, focussed on the problem of whether
God has abandoned Israel and concluding that God has not. Rom.
1.168.39 has no clear structural markers, and no such single clear
theme. We have an hypothesis that Rom. 1.164.25 is about how
God can be righteous in justifying believers without distinguishing
between Jew and Gentile. In Romans 58 we can observe that sin
and the law are major issues, apparently connected (Rom. 5.1221;
6.15; 7), and there seems to be a solution in Rom. 8.117. Rom.
5.111 and Rom. 8.1839 have strong eschatological elements, and
references to the justication and salvation of believers.
Having taken an overview of the text in descending order of
clarity of evidence, we now ask where Paul expected the Romans to
begin. The opening (Rom. 1.117) is dominated by the gospel. For
67
a greeting, Rom. 1.1 and 1.7 would be expansive; Rom. 1.17 is

overwhelming. It denes Paul's apostleship by the gospel. The
thanksgiving merges into the body of the letter. Rom. 1.815
mentions Paul's hopes and obligations as a preacher of the gospel,
especially to the Gentiles and therefore to the Romans. In Rom.
1.1617, the preaching seems to have begun. If the gospel was not
at the centre of Paul's attention when he began the letter, he
certainly went out of his way to give the Romans the impression
that it was. If he wanted to move away from the gospel after that,
he would have needed to do something to alert his Roman listeners.
Thus, the opening suggests that Paul's intention, or part of it,
may have been to preach the gospel by letter. What would this
mean? Scholars who suggest that in Romans Paul was preaching
the gospel do not usually take this up in undertaking exegesis of
the text. This gives the impression that for them preaching means
giving a general account of the gospel. The suggestion seems to be
a way of accounting for the fact that Paul does not appear to be
dealing with a particular problem. Yet our review of the contents
suggests that one problem was receiving considerable attention
the relationship between Jew and Gentile in life under the gospel.
This was clearly part of the question about God's righteousness in
Rom. 1.164.25, and the issue of God's faithfulness in Romans
911 is closely related. The food and holy days issue could have
been wholly or in part a JewGentile problem, and the linking
together of questions about sin and the Torah is at least potentially
part of the same constellation. The issue looms large in the closing
stages of the letter, with the heavy weighting of authority given to
the injunction to Jew and Gentile to welcome one another, the
concern about the offering of the Gentiles to God, the references
to the Gentile mission and the Jerusalem visit, and the nal
doxology.
If Paul was preaching, he was preaching to believers, so that the
presence of a particular issue is readily intelligible. He was aiming
not at conversion but at growth in the life of faith. The presence of
the JewGentile issue is readily intelligible, since at that time it was
an important factor in life under the gospel, and we know that Paul
had strong views about it. The suggestion that he was preaching
within the framework of a particular issue might enable us to
account for the fact that the body of the letter is not a systematic
account of the gospel.
Can we relate the features we observed in the letter to Paul's and
68
the Romans' situations and their participation in the church's life

in the fties?
Clearly, Paul understood his mission to the Gentiles as part of
God's purpose (for example Gal. 1.17; Rom. 15.1516). In Christ,
God had acted within Israel in a way that could be understood only
through Israel's experience of God's action, but had acted for all
people. Were the bounds of Israel, then, to be extended or broken?
Was Israel to expand through the incoming of the Gentiles, with all
Jewish institutions part of the working out of God's action, or was
the gospel to go out from Israel? Facing this question, Paul was
involved in a struggle in which the gospel and the church's identity
were at stake.
Of course, the issue did not appear rst in that theoretical
theological form, but in the form of practical questions. In the
records we have, the clearest example is the question of table
fellowship (Gal. 2.1114). There would be pastoral questions about
believers whose Gentile families would resist their becoming Jews.
If they had decided to become Jews, presumably they would be
prepared to inict and to bear the consequent suffering. If they had
believed in Jesus, received the Spirit, even been baptized, and were
then confronted with this demand, the case would have been
different. Missionaries encountering people who would like to join
them but did not want to become Jews must also have questioned
whether they were excluding people by imposing a barrier that
should not have been there. The question was whether Gentiles
who believed in Christ had to become Jews.
Paul's view and practice was that this was not appropriate and
must not be required. For us, knowing Christianity and Judaism as
separate religions, it is hard to realize how radical a decision this
was when there was no concept of `Christianity' and the churches
were not clearly differentiated from Judaism, with its variety. The
letters show this as a theological decision. Characteristically, Paul
went to the gospel to decide a question about life under the gospel.
In Christ, God was creating the relationship of human faith
responding to and depending on God's grace. This relationship will
be destroyed if another requirement is added. Paul was insisting
that the proper response to God's grace was no longer faith plus
Torah observance, but faith alone. Torah obedience had a place
only if it was already part of the believer's faith response. Even
then, it must be subordinated to the needs of the fellowship of
believers. To some other believers, this looked like proclaiming a
69
God who had abandoned Israel and therefore could not be trusted.
If that was his gospel, it was not good news. It was dangerous and
should be stopped. In practice, the problem centred on keeping or
not keeping the law. This meant that in the Hellenistic world Paul's
position could be, and apparently sometimes was, understood in
terms of freedom from restraint, so that he was charged with
antinomianism and encouraging sin (for example Rom. 3.78).
Thus, the JewGentile questions that we identied in the letter
were part of Paul's life, central to his calling as apostle to the
Gentiles. They were also part of his immediate situation. When he
was composing the letter he had just been through many months of
struggle and conict over them. Romans deals with themes that
appear in earlier letters, and several scholars have made lists of
parallels with Galatians and the Corinthian letters.4 Looking
forward, Paul was preparing to deliver the Gentile churches'
offering to the church in Jerusalem. His determination to risk
presenting it himself shows that for him it was not merely poor
relief. His fears, that he would be in danger from unbelieving Jews
and that the gift might not be acceptable to the Jerusalem church
(Rom. 15.301), suggest that he saw it as a symbol of the unity of
the church. Rejection of the gift would amount to rejection of the
Gentile churches, and of the gospel he preached. This would split
the church and probably make the Spanish mission more difcult.
For Paul, the truth of the gospel was at stake.
This problem provides the context for the JewGentile concerns.
It also leads us to the solution of another problem in Romans. Paul
addressed the Romans as eunh, suggesting that he saw them as one
of `his' Gentile churches, but much of the letter sounds very Jewish.
The problem arose from the Jewish matrix of the gospel. There was
no other language available to discuss it. Gentile believers would
have had no choice but to learn the language in the process of
trying to come to grips with the issues. In Rome, there were Jews
among them, as there were in the `Gentile' Corinthian church (Acts
18.8; 1 Cor. 1.14).
We have considered Paul who wrote the letter, and his interest in
the issues we identied in it. These issues were central to the life of
the whole church in this formative period. Now we consider the
Romans to whom Paul wrote. What would we like to know about
them? The clue is in the phrase `to whom Paul wrote'. Our present
4
e.g. Bornkamm, `Testament', 235; Wilckens, Der Brief an die Romer, I, 478.
70
purpose is to understand what Paul was wanting to say to the

Romans. Accordingly, we need to picture the community he had in
mind as he dictated the letter. Our sources are the letter and some
independent historical data.
We noted that the question at the centre of Paul's mission was
also at the centre of the church's life, and that it appeared in
practical as well as intellectual theological forms. Thus, we expect
that because the Roman believers were believers, they were actively
interested in it. Wherever Jew and Gentile came together in Christ,
these issues had to be faced and answers lived out. Under what
conditions, for instance, could or would Jewish and Gentile
believers eat together? Such questions do not go away. Only an allJew or all-Gentile church could avoid them. Far from being like
that, the Roman church/es, according to our evidence, were likely
to be feeling the issues particularly acutely.
The scanty evidence suggests that the church in Rome grew up
rst in relation to the synagogues. Claudius made a decree,
probably in AD 49,5 expelling the Jews from the city. Suetonius'
statement that this was because of disturbances caused by a Jew
called Chrestos6 suggests that it was because the gospel itself was
causing trouble in the Jewish community. We cannot be sure that
this was the reason for the edict,7 and we cannot know how
thoroughly it was enforced, but it must have removed from the
church at least the leaders among those believers who were Jews or
Gentiles who had been conspicuously engaged with synagogues.
Thus, the churches would have developed for several years of their
short history under more strongly Gentile inuence. This would not
have cut them off entirely from Jewish inuences, since it seems
unlikely that all believers with synagogue associations would have
been expelled. We can expect that there would have been a difcult
period after AD 54, when Claudius' death opened the way for the
return of the exiles. They would nd the Roman church changed.
They would also bring expectations and practices from the churches
in which they had been involved elsewhere. Thus, the Romans
would have had an active interest in the questions discussed in the
letter.
5
Achtemeier argues that there is no incontrovertible evidence for the date
(Ùnsearchable Judgements and Inscrutable Ways', 5234).
6
De Vita Caesarum 25.4.
7
Benko, `Pagan Criticism of Christianity during the First Two Centuries A.D.',
105661.
71
Given their history and Rome's position as a centre of travel and

trade, they may well have had more than normal interest in the
experiences and problems of other churches.
This external evidence converges with what we have found in the
letter to suggest that Paul was writing to the Roman believers
about questions that he expected would be of practical interest to
them. The questions demanded action, and the action would both
reect and help to form people's understanding of the gospel and
their response to it. The nature of the questions and our sketch of
the Romans' own situation suggest that they would probably have
created tensions and stresses for the Romans. The nature of the
letter, however, speaks against the hypothesis that Paul was writing
to deal with problems so that he could have a good visit when he
came. It is perfectly possible for a community to handle problems
in a constructive way that reects its health, and the letter appears
to be addressed to a church that Paul was glad to see as healthy and
ourishing (for example Rom. 1.813; 6.17; 15.14). There is no
reason not to take these positive statements seriously. Comparison
with the thanksgivings in other letters suggests that Paul gave
thanks for what he believed was there. He gave thanks for qualities
or activities of the Thessalonians (1 Thess. 1.210), Philippians
(Phil. 1.37) and Philemon (Philem. 47), but in the Corinthian
letters the thanksgiving focusses on God's action, gifts and faithfulness (1 Cor. 1.49; 2 Cor. 1.37), and in Galatians it is replaced by
the long doxological expansion of the greeting (Gal. 1.45).
Further, the only possible problem would be one of JewGentile
conict, so it would have been tactless to address them as a Gentile
church and then start talking to them as if they were Jews. His
language suggests that he was dealing with a problem that they
shared, not one that was splitting them into hostile factions. Again,
why would Paul overcome his reluctance to intervene in the affairs
of a church whose father he was not? Intervening from a distance,
he would risk worsening the situation or alienating the Romans. It
is hard, too, to see how he could think that intervention would be
effective when he handled the problem with such delicacy that we
cannot reconstruct it. He did not approach the Galatians or
Corinthians like that.
To form a picture of the Romans Paul was addressing, we must
also consider the relationship between him and them. Traditionally,
Romans was read on the basis that Paul, not having been to Rome,
did not know the Romans and was giving his views to people who
72
knew nothing of them. This tabula rasa view suits the perception of
the text as theological exposition, so it has lasted longer as an
effective (although unnoticed) presupposition of exegesis than it
has lasted in the debates about Romans. When we noted the tone
of authority in the letter, we noted also Paul's tact in exercising it.
Perhaps he knew that he was a controversial gure and exercised
his authority accordingly! We know that some of his friends and
former co-workers were in Rome at the time of the letter (Rom.
16.315). We also know that Rome was a centre of trade and
travel. As Malherbe has pointed out, this must have meant that
Christian communities heard about each other, and not all the
news was bad or produced problems.8 Paul was talking to the
Romans about problems that were important to his and their lives
in Christ because they were part of what it meant to be believers in
Christ at that time. He must have expected that they would be
interested to hear such a discussion from a person of whom they had
heard various, probably conicting, reports. Almost certainly, they
would have had a variety of attitudes towards him. This was his
rst direct contact with them, and he hoped that it would be the
beginning of a fruitful association. This view accounts better for the
evidence than the more simplistic suggestion that Paul was writing
to combat opposition and misunderstanding that had reached
Rome ahead of him.
We conclude that Romans represents the rst direct contact
between the apostle to the Gentiles and the church at Rome, and
that Paul chose to make that contact by beginning to exercise his
apostolic ministry among them. The bulk of the letter is a preaching
of the gospel as it bears on the intractable issue at the centre of
Paul's calling and of their life. On this view, the almost lyrical
appeal in Rom. 15.713 to welcome one another, Jew and Gentile,
is the climax of the letter. It can bear the weight of this signicance
because it is based in Christ's action, in Jewish tradition, and in
scripture. It represents Paul's goal in his preaching: to help the
Roman believers to share and live out his view of the obedience the
gospel demanded in this matter. Whether or not he knew that there
was friction in Rome, it is clear that at that stage of the church's life
the coming together of Jew and Gentile posed problems. This
passage shows it not as a problem to be handled but as a gift of
God to be received with joy. That would cast a new light on the
8
Social Aspects of Early Christianity, 635.
73
problem aspects. This was the response he was seeking. The

practical requests in the letter frame would then be expressions of
this commitment, or even the normal support the tiny churches
offered one another.
This identication of the response Paul was trying to elicit
matches well with his own statement about writing reminders with
a view to the Romans forming part of an acceptable offering, the
Gentiles (Rom. 15.1516). If the offering of the Gentiles as part of
the church was an offering made by Jew and Gentile together in
Christ, it would represent the fullment of God's purpose.
This is our rst hypothesis about Paul's purpose in writing
Romans. If it is to stand, we shall need to show how Rom. 5.111;
8.1839; 12.113.14 have their places in this preaching, and give a
fuller account of the rest of the letter body. This is an example of
work in the hermeneutical circle. It depends on a full teleological
reading of Rom. 1.164.25, and will be taken up in chapter 11.
We turn now to Paul's purpose in writing Rom. 1.164.25, its
function in the letter. Our hypothesis is that Paul was dealing with
a problem that God's righteousness was put in question if God
justied believing sinners on the basis of faith without distinguishing between Jew and Gentile. In terms of the goal of the whole
preaching, this discussion has two signicant features. It focusses
on the heart of the gospel, God's saving action in the Cross, and it
does this in such a way as to remove a barrier to mutual acceptance.
This barrier corresponds to the objection to Paul's insistence that
Gentile believers must not be required to become Jews, the objection that Paul was preaching a God who had abandoned Israel and
therefore was untrustworthy and no God.
Looking at the passage in this context, we notice that Paul was
not on the defensive. He was saying that through the Cross God is
righteous in graciously justifying believing sinners simply on the
basis of their faith. This appears as the fullment of God's faithfulness to Israel. Rom. 1.17 shows it as the fullment of the Habakkuk
prophecy; chapter 4 shows believers as the heirs of the promise to
Abraham. This argument relates to the ! IoydaiCv te prvton kai
% Ellhni of Rom. 1.16b, which at least implies that there is a place
in the universal gospel for Israel's election. In Rom. 3.2930, Paul
was saying that those who know that their God is the only God
should know that he is God of all peoples, and will treat others as
he treats them. Thus, we have reason to believe that Paul was not
defending salvation through faith alone as not inconsistent with
74
God's faithfulness to Israel. Rather, he was presenting it as the

fullment of God's faithfulness to Israel. This is consistent with the
tone of authority we noted in the letter, and with the suggestion
that Paul was preaching by letter. Although the problem facing the
churches set the agenda, Paul was preaching to the Romans, not
answering objectors on their terms. We shall need to take up this
point in dealing with the nature of the text. It affects the way we
perceive and respond to what Paul was saying.
We may now make the hypothesis that in Rom. 1.164.25 Paul
was grounding his preaching in God's saving action, showing that
God fullled the election of Israel in a way that removed the
distinction between Israel and the Gentiles in the matter of
salvation. His purpose in this presentation was to give the Romans
greater freedom for each other and greater openness to the other
things he had to say by removing a barrier to the mutual acceptance
of Jew and Gentile in the church. The boldness of his claim is far
more than is immediately obvious. It would have massive implications for the understanding of Israel's election and therefore for the
self-understanding of the Jewish believers involved. It would
demand the response of the whole person, not just intellectual
assent.
This hypothesis raises a question. If Paul was dealing with God's
faithfulness, why did he discuss God's righteousness? One of the
basic forms of gospel proclamation in the NT is the promise of
salvation at God's nal judgement. The language of Rom. 1.1617
svthria, a!pokalyptetai, dikaiosynh, the promise contained in
zhsetai was orienting the Romans to a preaching in that framework, and this orientation was maintained through the passage. In
that schema, God has the role of eschatological judge. When God
is acting as eschatological judge, the criterion of God's covenant
faithfulness is God's judicial righteousness.
We conclude our rst investigation of Paul's purpose in creating
our text by saying that he was taking the rst step in a preaching of
the gospel to the Roman believers. This preaching presented the
gospel through the lens of the church's problem of whether Gentiles
who believed in Christ had to become Jews. Paul's aim was to help
the Romans to share and act on his understanding that mutual
acceptance of Jew and Gentile as believers was a necessary response
to God's action in Christ. In this rst step, he was presenting that
action in such a way as to show it as both the fullment of God's
purpose in the election of Israel, and God's overcoming of the Jew
75
Gentile distinction. The response he was seeking from the Romans

was greater freedom for each other in the gospel, and greater
openness to the conclusions he drew from this view of God's
action.
To deepen our understanding of Paul's purpose, we need to
examine further the nature of text and audience. We shall take up
that investigation in chapter 8.
8
THE NATURE OF THE TEXT
In this chapter we take the third of the six steps involved in our
teleological reading of Rom. 1.164.25, formulating an hypothesis
about the nature of the text. This explicit hypothesis replaces the
implicit presupposition of the mainstream debate that the text is
theological exposition. We describe the nature of the text in order to
awaken the appropriate responses in ourselves. Since the identication of the text as exposition has been implicit, the responses it has
generated have all the power of tools unconsciously applied to the
text. We therefore need to formulate our new hypothesis as fully
and explicitly as possible, and be very conscious of what we are
doing when we are working with it on the teleological exposition.
Because the question is an unaccustomed one, at least in the
form in which we are asking it, we shall present the hypothesis in
four major statements about the way we perceive and respond to
the text. For each of these, we shall supply as much evidence as is
possible without entering into detailed exegesis, and discuss the
changes it requires in our responses to the text.
1.
In our teleological reading, we are seeking what Paul was

intending the Romans to hear when the letter was rst read
to them.
In this case, our rst and fundamental observation about the

nature of the text helps to form our response by dening more
closely our goal in reading. We have already argued that we
exegetes need to separate out our questions about the meaning of a
text. We need to ask rst what Paul was intending to say to the
Romans and then what we can learn about his theology from what
he said. Our rst statement gives a closer denition of `what Paul
was intending to say to the Romans'.
Romans is a rst-century letter. How is it different from our
letters? Why is the fact a ground for asserting that our concern in
76
77
the teleological reading is with what Paul intended the Romans to

hear when it was rst read to them? Does it have other implications
for our reading? Paul dictated the letter to Tertius (Rom. 16.22).
Questioning has not overset this consensus view. The objections
arise mainly from the difculty of composing such a long and
intricately developed piece of work by dictation with rst-century
materials and facilities. This reminds us that composing the letter
would be a long process, with interruptions. Accordingly, the
coherence we nd suggests that the content was planned. If the
question should arise in exegesis, we can reasonably assume that
Paul knew in general what was still to come when he was dictating
it.
When it was complete, the bulky papyrus would be given to a
messenger to take to Rome. In the rst-century Mediterranean
world, non-ofcial mail had to be sent by a private messenger,
often a traveller to the same destination, and its delivery was
subject to all the hazards of travel. Since it could fall into the wrong
hands, a letter was often intended to be supplemented by a spoken
report from the messenger.1 It seems that Paul was unusually
fortunate, in that he could rely on colleagues and friends as
messengers. Romans seems so full a statement that we gain the
impression that he was not relying on his own words being
supplemented,2 although the messenger might be helpful in the
church's discussion.3
When the letter arrived it would be read to the gathered
congregation (Col. 4.16; 1 Thess. 5.27; Philem. 12), in Rome
probably to several congregations at different times. We need some
slight acquaintance with palaeography and ancient education to
realize what `read to' means. Most documents were written without
accents, punctuation or breaks between words, so a reader would
work over the letter before attempting to read it to the group.
Anybody sufciently educated to do this would take it for granted
that the letter must be read with attention to bringing out its
meaning, so that the reading might seem to us to be something of a
1
On letter-carriers, see White, Light from Ancient Letters, 21416; letter 10, p. 34;
McGuire, `Letters and Letter Carriers in Christian Antiquity', 150, 185, 199200.
2
McGuire cites statistics from Wikenhauser showing that Paul's letters were
exceptionally long by the standards of even literary letters (`Letters and Letter
Carriers in Christian Antiquity', 148).
3
This seems more likely than Doty's suggestion that the letters were to be
supplemented (Letters in Primitive Christianity, p. 46 and n. 60).
78
performance.4 The greeting in Rev. 1.3 is to o" a!naginvskvn kai oi"

a!koyonteq. Since Romans survived to be copied, shared around
and nally included in the canon, we may assume that the Romans
went back to it after the rst reading, but they would probably do
this by rereading it or sections of it when the church gathered, and
talking about it. Thus, nobody would have read it the way we read
a letter. Even o" a!naginvskvn would be working on the mechanics
of reading and the needs of the audience, not simply reading for the
argument or the ideas.
We infer that Paul composed Romans by speaking and he
intended to speak to a gathered congregation. Thus, the analogies
in our world would be addresses to groups that are not in a position
to interact with us as we proceed, such as sermons or lectures. A
preacher or teacher characteristically draws on a wider knowledge
and understanding to say something particular to a congregation or
class. She is usually conscious of more meaning in the discourse
than the listeners are expected to hear. Clearly, the Romans kept
the letter and reread it, thus exploring its meaning further, and it
would seem wrong-headed to suppose that Paul did not hope that
they would do so. Romans represents an enormous amount of time
and effort on the part of Paul, Tertius, the messenger, o" a!naginvskvn and the Romans. Nevertheless, since it was for a
listening audience it had, to that extent, to function like a speech. It
would be created to make an impact at rst hearing.
This conclusion already represents a response different from the
responses usual in the debate to the fact that Romans is a letter.
Because of the radicality of our questioning in this study, we are
faced with an unknown a text whose nature we have to identify
and we have asked how we can be helped by the known fact that it
is a letter. In the debate, on the other hand, we move from a
`known' fact that Romans includes a long treatise section and
we are faced with the problem of what kind of a letter it can be. In
the rst case, we begin with the independent fact about the nature
of the text; in the second we begin with the starting position the
academic debate has reached.
Studies of epistolography have deepened our knowledge of
ancient letters, especially of epistolary conventions. We see again
Paul's freedom and authority as apostle, as he adapted the Hellen4
Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, 1656; Bonner, Education in
Ancient Rome, 2205. Quintilian explains the role of the comic actor in the teaching
of boys, including the reading of speeches (Institutes of Oratory I.11).
79
istic formulae to the service of the gospel.5 The massive scholarly

effort, however, has had only a little impact on exegesis and
debates on Paul's theology. This is not surprising, since the body of
a letter can serve so many different kinds of purpose and subject. In
our reading, we may nd help with some points of detail from those
studies.
At this point we should consider a probable objection to our
procedure. In asking what Paul was intending the Romans to hear
when the text was rst read to them, we may seem to be asking a
question which it is neither possible nor desirable to answer. As
regards the possibility of answering it, we share a problem that
faces all historical-critical exegesis because all of it takes account of
a writer's intention: even if we did arrive at the right answer, we
should have no means of knowing it. Further, it may be argued
that we should be reading the text, not dealing with some psychological entity in Paul to which we do not have access unless his text
fullled his intention perfectly and we can hear it exactly as he
intended it to be heard, two unlikely contingencies. Nevertheless,
Young and Ford are right in saying of 2 Corinthians, `No general
theory can be allowed to rule out what seems to be appropriate to
this particular text. 2 Corinthians is a functional link in a specic
chain of communication between Paul and the Corinthians, and the
intention of Paul is a key element in this.'6 Romans is not one of a
series of letters, but otherwise the same applies to it. NT scholars
are not normally persuaded to desist from investigations because
the evidence is insufcient. In this case, it is better than it is for
sociological studies, for instance. We have dened our task of
reading according to Paul's intention by saying that we are seeking
that element of meaning in the text that represents what he was
intending to say. Paul's intention created the text, that element of
meaning exists in it, and we have developed some criteria for
identifying it. Only after we have tested it shall we offer our
teleological reading as our best answer to the question of what Paul
was intending the Romans to hear.
Concerning the desirability of asking this question, we note
Barton's comment about the understanding of authorial intention
in historical-critical exegesis: `[It is] a caricature of historical
5
White, Light from Ancient Letters, 1920.

Meaning and Truth, 147. Their understanding of intention, however, is multifaceted, while ours is specic.
6
80
criticism to speak as if it were wedded to the author's intention in

this very narrow sense of ``what the author was explicitly wanting
to say at the moment of composition''; neither literary nor biblical
critics have at all often been as indifferent as this to ``the text
itself.'' '7 But Romans is a letter, so for our teleological reading we
are necessarily interested in what Paul was èxplicitly wanting to
say at the moment of composition'. It does not follow, however,
that in our exegesis we are `wedded' to that, since it comprises
teleological plus causal exposition. Barton's comment presupposes
the historical-critical approach that deals with the texts as expressions of Paul's thought, however polemical or pastoral.
In taking the text seriously as a letter, we encounter the
question of the role of authorial intention in meaning. Debates on
this issue are usually in the context of hermeneutics, and for NT
scholarship tend to draw on literary theory. In neither of these
contexts is a high priority given to letter as letter. We observed in
chapter 1 that the model of meaning actually appropriate in
reading a text varies with the nature of the text and our purpose
in reading it. While authorial intention can be placed low in
considering the meaning of literary texts, it is much more important for letters, like Romans, which are direct communication
from one person to particular others. This factor tends to fall
from consideration for two reasons. Historical-critical exegesis has
characteristically considered the letters as expressions of Paul's
thought rather than as communication, thus making them more
amenable to literary criteria of meaning. As Young and Ford
observe, inclusion in the canon brought about an effective change
of genre from occasional letter to scripture.8 Ricoeur's comment
that Paul's letters are addressed as much to the modern as to the
original readers9 is possible only because they have become part
of the canon, and it clearly involves treating them differently from
ordinary letters. We recognize, however, that scripture is made up
of a variety of genres, including letters. Our task at this stage is to
treat Romans as whatever kind of letter we can nd it to be. In
doing so, we are not ignoring the fact that it is scripture, but
recognizing for our generation that this scripture has the form of
an occasional letter.
7
8
9
Reading the Old Testament, 170.

Meaning and Truth, 228.
Interpretation Theory, 93.

2.
81
Romans as letter was created and received by speaking and

listening. Thus, for teleological reading it calls for responses
appropriate to speech.
We must make sense of all of the text in sequence, assuming that

Paul intended a single, sequential communication. We must assume
that it will be simple in the sense of being uncomplicated, suitable
for hearers. This does not mean that it will be easy. It need not have
been for the Romans, and as listeners-in across nearly two
millennia we may well nd it difcult. We may expect, however,
that points may be made at length, and words may be spent on
providing such aural markers as emphasis, or indicators that new
matters are being taken up. The introductory questions in Rom. 4.3
and Gal. 3.2 are examples of the former. Rom. 3.31; 6.1 take up
issues arising from what has been said, and turn the audience's
attention to discussion of them. Since listeners lack time to puzzle
over difcult constructions, we must take what would have been
the most obvious interpretation of any obscure construction.
Already in the 1950s, Dahl noted that Greek prose is generally
closer to speech than are modern literary works. Since texts were
for hearing rather than seeing, he urged that in order to follow the
ow of thought in the Pauline letters we should prefer aural signals
to the visual ones provided by modern typography, chapter and
verse divisions, headings and systematized outlines.10 This insight is
being conrmed and extended in more recent studies of orality.11 In
reading Romans as a letter, we need to go further, too. Dahl wrote,
in the tradition of mainstream exegesis, of following the ow of
thought. We have to follow the ow of Paul's address to the
Romans.
Again, Romans as a rst-century letter demands from us responses different from our accustomed ones. We shall not be able
to move back and forth in the text in the way we do as readers. We
shall not be able to do what Wilckens does at Rom. 3.27, and read
something in the light of what comes after it.12 The linearity of
speech also carries the implication that it is unlikely that Paul was
expecting the Romans to hold over a point until it became clear
several of our chapters later. Wright presupposes this with his
10
`The Missionary Theology in the Epistle to the Romans', 79. (Originally
published 1956.)
11
A helpful example is Achtemeier's Òmne Verbum Sonat', esp. 1823.
12
Der Brief an die Romer, I, 247.
82
argument that Paul's references to justication by works in Rom.

2.116 represent a system that will not come into action until
appropriate recipients have been created by the process described in
Romans 38.13 The fact that listening audiences do not have time
to formulate and discard hypotheses about difcult passages puts a
question mark over readings of Rom. 1.17, such as Lagrange's14
and Minear's,15 taking e!k pistevq ei! q pistin with dikaiosynh
ueoy rather than with a!pokalyptetai.
Romans comes to us as a text like the other texts on our desks,
and so invites the kinds of responses we give to them. The fact that
it belongs to a realm of speaking and hearing challenges our
patterns of response. We need to explore the difference between it
and the other texts on our desks, keeping in mind the signicance
of the fact that as text it belongs to a realm of speaking and
hearing. We can be helped by studies of orality and literacy.
The basic distinction we must recognize is that between oral and
literate cultures. We twentieth-century Western scholars belong to
and are deeply formed by a highly textual sub-culture of a printliterate culture that is already moving into new media worlds. We
cannot observe oral and literate cultures from neutral ground, but
must ask how oral cultures differ from literate ones.
In our culture, writing and print shape not only communication
but modes of thought, and in Synoptic studies we had to learn that
there are no such things as oral texts, verbal `texts' waiting to be
written down. Patterns of thought and the functioning of individual
and communal memory are different in oral cultures. For us the
most important aspect of this is that in a truly oral culture thought
has to be much more concrete and presentation has to be shaped by
devices like contrast, repetition and rhythm, because words once
spoken are past. One cannot refer back, as we do with written notes
and printed books. Elaborate chains of argument with each step
stated concisely and only once are impractical.16
Our immediate reaction to this contrast is that Paul belongs with
us on the literate side of the divide. His letters were written; they
come from a culture that valued greatly the written words of
scripture; there is a constant stitching together with the argumentative connectives of thought or speech that has some roots in
13
14
15
16
`The Messiah and the People of God', 11617.

Romains, 20.
The Obedience of Faith, 412.
Ong provides a useful account. Orality and Literacy, ch. 3, esp. 3157.
83
writing. Ultimately it was not impossible for either Paul or the

Romans to refer back, although it would have been difcult (and
probably inconceivable) for Paul, as requiring a major interruption
while Tertius found the place in the featureless landscape of a
papyrus text,17 and impossible for the Romans in the course of a
reading of the letter, although not afterwards. Does not this suggest
that we can look on the orality of Romans as comparatively
incidental, and not the major challenge it has seemed?
To answer that, we need to realize that in real life the basic oral
literate distinction is blurred. The skills of writing and reading enter
a culture and develop within it. In use, the attitudes and skills of
orality and literacy interact with each other and with the culture in
a process of mutual enrichment.18 Experts trace stages by which
literacy spreads and establishes its inuence. Havelock's schema is
a good example. He lists craft literacy, semi-literacy, recitation
literacy, scriptorial literacy, typographical literacy.19 Of course, à
culture' here cannot be understood monolithically, either. Geographical location and social class, for instance, will contribute to a
very varied tapestry. By Paul's time, reading and writing had had
several centuries to make their mark on the culture of his world.
In seeking to understand where Paul and we t on an orality
literacy spectrum, it is illuminating to examine the relationships
between writing and speech. In our scholarly sub-culture, writing is
dominant. It is important in forming thinking, and is the primary
means of communication. Speech is secondary. A characteristic
form is the lecture, which normally takes its reference points from
printed texts. We may be annoyed if somebody lectures by reading
the typescript of a book in preparation. Our annoyance shows that
there are proper differences between writing and speech; the fact
that such lectures do occur indicates that the distinction can be
over-ridden. Even proper lectures usually ask audiences to do with
their ears what they are trained to do with their eyes, follow and
assess complex arguments. The other characteristic form of scholarly speech is debate, in seminars or the like. Some people are
adept at developing and communicating ideas in this medium;
17
Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, gures 18, 26, 41; Reynolds and
Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 25.
18
Thomas gives a good account of the complexities in Literacy and Orality in
Ancient Greece, Introduction and ch. 2.
19
Origins of Western Literacy, 201.
84
others nd it difcult. To present a substantial argument, we

prepare a paper, again subjecting speech to writing.
None of us would advise a speaker learning the craft to speak as
she writes. We are more likely to be encouraging such a person to
overcome this disability. Yet two of the greatest Roman rhetoricians, Cicero and Quintilian, advised orators that one should
speak as one writes.20 We noted Dahl's observation that Greek
prose is more like speech than is ours. These observations encapsulate the subjection of writing to speech in Paul's world. The
primary mode of communication was speech. Public oratory was
important in forming policy and administering justice. It was in the
administration of sprawling empires that writing came into its
own.21 In education, the dominance of speech may be observed in
the fact that reading meant reading aloud, and in the movement
down the school system of the teaching of oratory or declamation.22 Most literature was suited for reading aloud. It is a
commonplace of Pauline scholarship that anybody in the cities of
Paul's world could listen to many public speakers.
The secondary nature of written tradition in the church illustrates
the dominance of speech. We nd Paul using letters as a substitute
for being with his churches; 23 the gospels were not written until
decades after the events they interpret and thus record. Eusebius
quotes Papias as preferring oral testimony, even though indirect, to
mere books.24 Similarly, there stood alongside the written Torah an
oral tradition that would be recorded in writing over a number of
later centuries.
There was often something second-hand about an encounter
with a document. Most people were illiterate, dependent on somebody who could read to them. Harris argues that the conditions for
producing more than a low level of craftsman's literacy in a
community did not exist in the ancient world, and estimates an
over-all level of literacy below 15 per cent for relatively highly
20
Cicero, De Oratore I.33.1502; I.60.257; II.22.96. Quintilian, Institutes
XII.10.4955.
21
Bowen, History of Western Education, 1, 1947; Easterling, `Books and
Readers in the Greek World: 2. Hellenistic and Imperial Periods', 17; Harris, Ancient
Literacy, 20618.
22
Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome, 2513, 331.
23
e.g. White, `Saint Paul and the Apostolic Letter Tradition', 439; Stirewalt,
`Paul's Evaluation of Letter-Writing', 192.
24
Ecclesiastical History III.39.34. Alexander demonstrates a similar view in the
wider society (`The Living Voice').
85
literate Rome and Italy in the late Republic and high Empire.25
Dewey presents an alternative scholarly view that this estimate is
much too high.26 For those with the skill, reading was not the
automatic process it is for us. At the most mechanical level, the
person who creates a text does so by inscribing a series of conventional marks on a sufciently smooth surface. At the same mechanical level, we may describe the reader's activity as unlocking the
meaning locked up in the cipher. Modern printed books with clear,
even type, chapters, paragraphs, sub-headings, even illustrations,
allow for an eyebrain process. Not only is there no need of speech;
it would slow the process. A manuscript, written with attention to
the economical use of relatively expensive materials,27 without our
aids to the eye, was much more in need of being unlocked by a
voice, and that was what normally happened.28 Our reading
material and processes free us to concentrate directly on ideas;
theirs reected, and contributed to, the dominance of speech. Ong
writes,
The reestablishment of the written or printed word in the
oral world means that the word must somehow be restored
to the mouth, the oral cavities and apparatus where the
word originated. [In print cultures, this is minimized.] The
case was different in the highly oral cultures in which the
biblical texts came into being, where reading was less
deeply interiorized, that is to say, where reading called for
a more conscious effort, was considered a greater achievement, and was less a determinant of psychic structures and
personality, still basically oral in organization.29
This dominance of speech created skills different from ours in Paul
as author and the Romans as listeners. The difculty one of us
would face in composing a letter as long and complex as Romans
under the conditions then prevailing is no measure of the degree or
kind of difculty Paul faced. Similarly, the Romans' listening skills
would be better than ours, but also shaped by different experience.
25
Ancient Literacy, 1124, 2667.

`Textuality in an Oral Culture', 39.
27
Harris, Ancient Literacy, 1946.
28
B. M. W. Knox gathers evidence showing that there was nothing surprising
about silent reading, but does not dispute that reading aloud was the norm. `Silent
Reading in Antiquity'.
29
`Maranatha', 2589.
26
86
Reading Romans as speech, we must do our best to read with our

ears and pay attention to aural indicators in Paul's text.
Thus, although it is a text from a literate culture, its oral
character makes it decisively different from our texts. How, then,
do we see the relationship between orality and textuality in
Romans?
Ong offers an illuminating distinction. Writing (or print), he
says, is not to be conceived as a means of preserving what somebody wants to say so that it can be transmitted to recipients
separated from the speaker by time and/or space. A text is written
for readers who are individuals, and can be collectively conceived
as a readership; oral communication on the scale of Romans is
spoken for listeners who collectively constitute an audience. The
writer communicates with the readership virtually entirely by
words.30 The readership of an Hermeneia commentary differs
greatly from the readership of a devotional study of the same text.
The readership is not present to the author, although it affects the
way the text is written. It consists of individuals who as readers are
independent of one another. Speeches are spoken for audiences.
The speaker is present to the audience and therefore communicates
not only by the words, but also through use of the voice and
through the complex we call body language.31 The audience is
present to the speaker, and can affect the speech not only in the
planning but also by its reactions. The members of an audience are
present to each other, and the audience as an entity reacts to the
speech as it proceeds. (An interesting sidelight on both the reality of
this distinction and the dominance of writing in our culture is the
woodenness we often notice in speeches read by public gures
facing our media.)
This contrast illuminates a number of elements in our own
situation as readers and in the text of Romans. Recognizing their
occasional nature, we have held that Paul's letters were substitutes
for his presence with the churches. Comparing that with our
situation in our highly literate culture, we realize that we, too,
sometimes use letters as a substitute for being there, as when we
write to friends, or send a greeting to a celebration at which we
should like to be present. Our books and articles, however, are not
30
`The Writer's Audience is always a Fiction', 568. In modern books, this can
be modied by such factors as page lay-out and illustrations. Page lay-out in early
printed books shows how slowly this advantage was taken up.
31
Cicero, De Oratore III.5660; Quintilian, Institutes II.12.10.
87
substitutes for personal presence. We take advantage of the writing/

print medium to develop long, complex arguments, and to make
demands on our readers that are alien to oral settings.
In contrast, we nd in Romans extensive evidence that Paul was
doing everything he could to reach across the time-space gap which
separated him from the Romans and which is represented by the
fact that it is a text. He calls them a!delfoi; he draws on their
existing knowledge or understanding with oi damen and a!gnoeite;
he draws on their memory of being baptized (Rom. 6.111); he
draws on scripture; he uses the teacher's techniques of the diatribe
to help them to keep pace with what he is saying; he leads them
carefully through complex points (for example Rom. 4.10); he
waxes passionate and lyrical (Rom. 8.319; 15.813).
Even in our world a personal letter can be the nearest thing to
snap frozen speech that the written medium allows. Ong's distinction is important for the contrast between speech and writing,
between orality and literacy, but it does not rule out the practical
fact that writing does also preserve words and facilitate longdistance communication.32 We may say that the textuality of
Romans represents the fact that Paul and his audience were not
present to one another, so that the interactive elements of the
speakeraudience situation were missing; its orality is represented
by the facts that he was speaking, and that he was speaking for
what he knew would be an audience, not a readership. He worked
within the linearity of speech and hearing, which presents different
opportunities and constraints from those the written media offer
us.
In a sense, the textuality of Romans was the alien thing about it
for Paul, and we nd him struggling against it. From our scholars'
standpoint in a highly textual sub-culture of a highly literate
culture, its orality is the alien thing, and we have to come to terms
with that.
Corresponding to the dominance of speech was the pervasive
inuence of rhetoric in the Graeco-Roman world. Letter-writing
was taught as a branch of rhetoric. Looking to the study of rhetoric
for help with our teleological reading of Romans, we nd that the
yield is disappointingly small, but the little we do gain is very
signicant.
32
Lentz, Orality and Literacy in Hellenic Greece, 34; Thomas, Literacy and
Orality in Ancient Greece, 28.
88
The work of Betz on Galatians 33 and of Young and Ford on

2 Corinthians 34 might give us hope that studies of rhetoric would
help with the question of the literary genre of Romans. `Letter' is
too vague. Here we are largely disappointed. Scholars applying
rhetorical theory to Romans do not necessarily nd themselves
forced to question seriously the traditional framework of exegesis.35
Reading within that framework, many have identied it as demonstrative or epideictic. This is hard to dene,36 but its application to
Romans means that Paul's aim was to strengthen the Romans in
commitment to an agreed value and encourage them to act on their
conviction. This could include trying to improve their understanding or to make clear the urgency of the need for action. This
happens to converge with our identication of Romans as
preaching, and it agrees with what Paul said in Rom. 15.1416. It
does not offer a formal structure to guide our reading. It does
suggest that the element of apology some scholars nd in Romans
was not sufcient to form the character of the discourse. If it had
done so, we should expect that Romans could be seen to have the
form of an apologetic letter, or at least some marked characteristics. Rhetoric formalizes patterns of ordinary speech, and the
ancient rhetoricians knew that untrained people will offer defences
that follow the shape of a formal forensic speech.37
Sharpening earlier references to Romans as protreptic,38 Aune 39
and Guerra 40 argue that Romans can be identied as a logoq
protreptikoq. Although this genre does not appear in the extant
rhetorical handbooks, perhaps because of the conict between
philosophy and rhetoric,41 the identication serves the same
purpose in our enquiry as rhetorical ones. It is clear that protreptikoq logoq was a type of speech and writing recognized in the
33
Galatians.
Meaning and Truth, esp. 3644.
35
e.g. Wuellner, `Paul's Rhetoric of Argumentation in Romans'; Jewett, `Following the Argument of Romans'; Kennedy, New Testament Interpretation, 1526.
36
Good introductory outlines are offered by Kennedy (New Testament Interpretation, 737) and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (The New Rhetoric, 4753).
37
Quintilian, Institutes II.17.56.
38
Berger, Formgeschichte des Neuen Testaments, 217; Stuhlmacher, Der Brief an
die Romer, 17.
39
`Romans as a Logos Protreptikos'; cf. The New Testament in its Literary
Environment, 219.
40
Romans and the Apologetic Tradition.
41
Aune, `Romans as a Logos Protreptikos', 96.
34
89
ancient world,42 and there is a good, not denitive, case for

assigning Romans to it. The value of this identication to us is
limited by the uidity of the genre. The clearest identifying factor is
purpose. The writer or speaker is urging the audience to a way of
life or, in derived forms of the genre, radical action. Jordan gives
the critical identication point as the situation of radical choice.43
Jordan and Guerra accept that protreptic could also be used to
encourage continuing or renewed commitment in those who had
already made the choice.44 The second identifying factor is method
or content. The protreptic encourages commitment negatively by
showing the inferiority of all alternatives and positively by presenting the supreme desirability of the cause espoused. It may also
include direct urging to accept the invitation.45 While protreptics
take a wide variety of literary forms,46 these three elements at least
reasonably often formed a structural feature, so that a groundclearing negative section was followed by the positive presentation
and then by an invitation. This looks like another case of a literary
or rhetorical form following the patterns of everyday speech.
Guerra tries to rm this structure into an identifying feature of the
genre, but this would exclude Romans, since the A, B, C structure
is there broken down by Romans 911, which he identies as a
return to the negative,47 giving an A, B, A, C structure supposing
one agrees that Romans 18 comprises one ground-clearing and
one positive block. The characterization of Romans as protreptikoq logoq converges with the rhetoricians' characterization of it
as epideictic and with our characterization of it as preaching.
Another way of drawing on rhetorical theory is to see how Paul
was using rhetorical techniques. Elliott asks how Paul was dening
and modifying a rhetorical situation, and thereby reads Romans
14, with its Jewish content, as addressed to Gentiles.48 Although
he refers to the letter as hortatory, and this is reected in his
exegesis, he does not identify clearly the relationship between
exhortation and theological exposition. This approach offers us no
42
Ibid., 91109; Jordan, Àncient Philosophical Protreptic', 30910; Guerra,
Romans and the Apologetic Tradition, 122.
43
Àncient Philosophical Protreptic', 333.
44
Ibid., 330; Guerra, Romans and the Apologetic Tradition, 170.
45
Guerra, Romans and the Apologetic Tradition, 170.
46
Jordan, Àncient Philosophical Protreptic', 328; Aune, `Romans as a Logos
Protreptikos', 97.
47
Romans and the Apologetic Tradition, 144.
48
Rhetoric, ch. 2 and excursus.
90
help with the genre question and, since in practice it involves the
application of an esoteric discipline to a known text, does not offer
us real hope of help with our radical question about the nature of
the text. Again, rhetorical rules are a formalization of processes of
ordinary speech.
Our study leads us to concur with S. E. Porter's carefully argued
conclusion that there is little ground for treating the letters as if
they were formal speeches and applying the categories of formal
Graeco-Roman rhetoric.49 Accordingly, the most important rhetoricians' contributions to our teleological reading are summed up in
Kennedy's statement that `[a] speech is linear and cumulative, and
any context in it can only be perceived in contrast to what has gone
before, especially what has gone immediately before, though a very
able speaker lays the ground for what he intends to say later and
has a total unity in mind when he rst begins to speak'.50 However
much the Romans might have learnt from rereading the letter later,
it is designed, like a speech, to communicate a message as it was
being heard.
Historical-critical exegetes are likely to experience as limiting the
constraints of reading the letter as speech. We need to be clear what
these constraints are. In identifying what Paul intended to say to
the Romans, we are dealing with linear speech. On the other hand,
we may sometimes need to examine other contexts in which a word
or concept is found in order to understand it as nearly as possible
in Paul's way. This process is analogous to using a lexicon in
reading a foreign language. For this purpose, the context literature
includes parts of the letter that from a listener's point of view are
still to come, as well as other contemporary documents. In the
causal exposition, the second part of our total exegesis, we shall be
seeking patterns of thought in a known text and therefore approach
it in a more familiar way.
3.
In Romans, Paul was preaching the gospel to a believing

community.
We formed this hypothesis in studying Paul's purpose. It provides

our best answer to the question of literary genre, a limited but
useful answer. We now dene and describe what we mean by
`preaching', show how that identication will shape our response to
49
`The Theoretical Justication for the Application of Rhetorical Categories to
Pauline Epistolary Literature'.
50
New Testament Interpretation, 5.
91
the text, and take note of the way these responses differ from our
accustomed ones.
A number of earlier expositors have suggested that in Romans
Paul was preaching,51 although they still treat it as theological
exposition. This seems to be a way of accounting for the perception
of Romans as systematic but not a full account of the gospel. Paul
can be seen as preaching and as engaged in very abstract discussion,
hard for listeners to follow.52 Certainly such preaching occurs, but
given Paul's missionary record, we should hesitate to accept that he
would have preached in such a way. Our examination of the use of
paq in Rom. 1.163.26 suggests that he was not doing so in
Romans.
It may be objected that the mainstream debate does not simply
treat Romans as theological exposition, but recognizes in it a
variety of literary forms such as exhortation, doxology, liturgical
forms, even liturgical and credal quotations. This recognition is
important in the debate as the basis of form-critical studies of prePauline tradition. These are important for understanding the
history of the church and those aspects of Paul's thought that are
revealed in his adaptations of traditional material. A classic
example is the identication of a pre-Pauline formula in Rom.
3.246. We nd, though, that these observations are sometimes in
tension with the way the text is treated as theological exposition.
Commentators generally approach Romans just as they would
anybody else's theological exposition, except that they are expounding it, not debating with it. The literary forms generally lose
their own character and become elements of the exposition. For
example a quoted prayer is being cited, not prayed.
What do we mean by calling Romans preaching? Paul was
addressing believers, so it is not missionary preaching, although
traces of his missionary preaching have been found in it.53 Readers
who nd strange the concept of preaching the gospel to believers
51
e.g. Gaugler, Der Romerbrief, 5; Kertelge, The Epistle to the Romans, 201;
Wire, `Pauline Theology as an Understanding of God', 162; Black, Romans, 20;
Scroggs, `Paul as Rhetorician', 27198.
52
In `Following the Argument of Romans', Jewett described the letter as
`situational' (382) and as `highly abstract' (383). Although this language disappears
from the amplied version in Donfried's second edition of The Romans Debate, the
impression remains. See also Dahl, `The Missionary Theology in the Epistle to the
Romans', 74.
53
Some commentaries; Bultmann, Der Stil der paulinischen Predigt, 3, 1079;
Bussmann, Themen der paulinischen Missionspredigt auf dem Hintergrund der spatjudisch-hellenistischen Missionsliteratur, ch. 5, esp. 1089.
92
may nd Beker's concept of contextual theology helpful: `[Paul]

was able to bring the gospel to speech in each new situation without
compromising either the wholeness of the gospel or the specicity
of the occasion to which it was addressed.'54 Preaching to believers
is characteristically concerned with the way the gospel addresses
particular believers in their particular situation, with articulating its
claim on their obedience. This coheres with our hypothesis about
Paul's purpose. It is what we mean by `preaching' in this study. It is
different from the concept of Romans as teaching, which is more a
matter of improving their understanding of the gospel, although
hard and fast distinctions cannot be made.
`Paul's contextual way of doing theology' is not, though, another
way of saying `preaching to believers'. Beker discusses `contingency'
and `the specicity of the occasion to which it was addressed'. He
stresses the importance of actual situations and real people, but in
highly abstract language. This seems to shape his own thinking into
a far from concrete form. `Paul's contextual way of doing theology'
is Paul's way of doing something we do. He is doing theology, but
instead of discussing theological problems on an academic agenda,
he is discussing theological problems arising in particular situations. While it is true that Paul was doing theology, and to such
good effect that the church has been indebted to him ever since,
some such phrase as `pastoring theologically' would better characterize the processes Beker describes. This formulation equally
respects the central idea that Paul was concerned with the truth of
the gospel in particular situations. It brings out the action aspect,
and also the fact that Paul was addressing people, not situations or
occasions. `Paul's contextual way of doing theology' leads us to
read Romans as theological exposition. Beker captures this when
he writes, `This particular problem gives Paul the opportunity to
address the church about the fundamental role of Israel in salvation-history in the framework of the universality of God's grace in
Christ for all people.'55 Fitzmyer conates lecturing and preaching
in his examination of the language and style of Romans.56 Against
this perception, we are stressing the difference.
Beker's approach is typical of present-day exegesis of Paul's
letters. In the modern West, people usually understand themselves
in psychological and sociological terms, and pastoral care tends to
54
55
56
Paul the Apostle, 335, quotation, 34.

Ibid., 92.
Romans, 92.
93
operate accordingly. Further, it is usually conceived as work with

individuals. The care of a congregation, as distinct from the
individuals in it, does not come readily to mind. Paul was writing to
congregations. His language of sin, grace and righteousness is for
us the specialized language of a specialist discipline, theology. The
pastoral concerns for which `theological language' is used become a
separate specialist discipline, with a title like Spiritual Direction. To
be or not to be religious is in our world a matter of private
preference. With our unconscious assumption that our culture is
normative for humanity, we forget how unusual in human terms is
this privatization of religion, and we take Paul with us into the
world of `theology'. Then we abstract from his language, making
the Paul of scholarly writing even more like us. We write about
`justication'. Paul talked about justifying and being justied, but
the noun dikaivsiq appears only twice in the NT: ei! q dikaivsin
zvhq (Rom. 5.18b) and h!geruh dia thn dikaivsin h"mvn (Rom.
4.25b). We need to remind ourselves that Paul's purpose as we
identied it in chapter 7 can properly be called pastoral. Mainstream exegesis calls the letters pastoral and therefore seeks the
problems to which they were addressed. That approach suggests
that Paul's pastoral method was to identify the theological problem
involved in a situation and write a theological argument to deal
with it. That is not what we mean by `preaching', or even by
`pastoring theologically'.
`Preaching' is the answer we can give to the question of Romans'
literary genre. What is the use and what are the limits of this
identication? It is very important to realize that this label is
anachronistic. We do not know what preaching to believers was
like in Paul's time, and our picture of Jewish preaching is inadequate. This creates two important limitations. First, we cannot
expect any help with questions of form or structure. Second, we
must not be tempted to go on and claim that we now have, in
Romans, an example of rst-century preaching in the church. We
lack the historical evidence for that.57 What we have found is that
57
Bultmann notes that we have no sermons from Paul (Der Stil der paulinischen
Predigt, 3). Preaching in Diaspora synagogues seems a likely model, but Sanders
points out that we have no samples (Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, 1301).
Thyen's effort to trace the preaching style uses indirect evidence (Der Stil der judischhellenistischen Homilie, 67), and details of style are not what we need. Examples
offered by Wills (`The Form of the Sermon in Hellenistic Judaism and Earliest
Christianity') and Siegert (Drei hellenistisch-judische Predigten) are unhelpful for
Romans.
94
in Romans Paul was doing something that is best described

according to our experience as very good pastoral preaching. He
was addressing the gospel to these people, not talking about it. This
identication is thus a tool to guide our responses.
What is the difference between preaching, to which we shall be
responding in this study, and theological exposition, to which we
have been responding in the mainstream debate? We can see this
most clearly by looking rst at purpose. The expositor is concerned
primarily with ideas, and the aim of theological exposition is the
assessment that a convincing case has been made. There may be a
desire for action on the basis of a positive assessment, but that is a
subsequent issue. The preacher is concerned primarily with hearers,
and the aim of preaching is conviction leading to action. The
hearers should be led to new or deeper understanding of and
obedience to the gospel as it addresses them in their situation, not
simply to assent to a doctrinal account. A preacher therefore seeks
to engage people's feelings and wills, as well as their minds. We can
see evidence of this in Rom. 1.164.25 in the drama of the
presentation, the lively dialogue sections, the appeals to personal
experience, and the deference to sacred authority. We have looked
already at the things Paul did to try to engage directly with his
hearers. As readers of this preaching, we miss tones and emphases
provided by the voice, and the body language. Of course, the
Romans heard the letter with somebody else's voice and presence,
although we do have reason to believe that there would have been a
reader available whom Paul could trust for a sympathetic presentation. He had friends in Rome (Rom. 16.315) or may have been
able to brief a literate letter-carrier, probably a colleague.
If we respond to theological exposition, we deal with the ideas.
Our question about dikaiosynh ueoy, for instance, is, What did
Paul mean by this term? If we are responding to preaching, we
visualize Paul concentrating on his hearers as he dictates, and
drawing on a fuller understanding to say something in particular to
them. Then we need the best possible understanding of Paul's
concept, but our attention will be focussed on the way the phrase is
functioning here. It appears in Rom. 1.1617. Seeing the text as
theological exposition, participants in the mainstream debate put
dikaiosynh ueoy into its thought context very carefully. The ideas
Paul was using are studied in depth. Reading the text as preaching,
we need to take that work with us as we consider it in this
preaching. So far, we have identied the relevant issue as the
95
relationship of Jews and Gentiles in Christ, with the question of

how God could be righteous if he justied believing sinners on the
basis of faith, without reference to the JewGentile distinction.
Having examined the concept and the situation, we nd Paul
making a claim which would have seemed to many of his hearers to
impugn God's righteousness as the faithful covenant God of Israel.
In the same statement, he was claiming this as the effective
expression of God's righteousness. A little reection on the problems of JewGentile relationships in the church will show us that
it would have been improbable to the point of impossibility that the
Romans would have reacted to Rom. 1.1617 in the dispassionately analytical spirit of the modern scholar, or that Paul intended
that they should. It amounts to a bold claim in a painful debate:
`Yes, my brothers, salvation is indeed for all who believe without
any other condition, and in so saving us God is revealing his
righteousness as the God who elected Israel, and fullling the word
of the prophet.' We can only conclude that Paul meant to make the
Romans feel a dilemma and want to know what was coming next.
If it will stand the test of exegesis, our identication of the text as
preaching to believers resolves what has been seen in the debate as
the problem that Romans is a letter. Whereas the debate has moved
in the direction of accommodating our understanding of what
letters are like to the perception that Romans contains a long
treatise section, we have set aside that perception. Our re-examination of the text has led to a view of Romans that lies well within the
bounds of what we understand by an occasional letter, even though
it is not dealing with a situation peculiar to Rome. We have not
tried to t it into some preconceived idea of what an occasional
letter should be. Paul could have written letters that were ofcial
documents in the church;58 he could have written a letter-essay to
the Romans.59 Such proposals accommodate the `treatise section'.
Starting from the text and from knowledge of Hellenistic letters, we
have concluded that he did not do so.
We have now identied the text as preaching that was meant to
be read to a listening audience, as text belonging to an oral-aural
milieu outside our experience. We can sum up the guidance this
gives for the teleological reading by saying that it imposes a
criterion of intelligibility. Our reading must be something that we
58
59
Berger, Àpostelbrief und apostolische Rede'.

Stirewalt, `The Form and Function of the Greek Letter-Essay'.
96
can reasonably suppose that Paul would expect to be accessible to

his hearers.
Preaching involves a relationship between preacher and congregation. Theological exposition presupposes a relationship between
expositor and readership or lecture audience. These relationships
are different. Because we have identied Romans as encapsulating
the preachercongregation relationship and not the expositorreadership relationship, the text will look different. We take up this
issue as we turn to the question of Paul's audience.
4.
In preaching, Paul was speaking with authority to a committed audience, not with some difdence to an adversarial
one. In Rom. 1.164.25 he was addressing the Roman
believers via a narratee, a believer responding to the gospel
from within a conservative Jewish frame of reference. This
character we call The Conservative.
Preaching to believers presupposes a committed congregation, and

this is the rst step we take in dening Paul's audience. The
question of audience has already arisen in chapter 6. When the
truth of a universal statement is being taken for granted and
attention is on what it means for speaker and addressee, then the
question of who is being addressed is urgent.
In the mainstream debate on Romans, the question of audience
does not have this specicity and urgency. It is a preliminary
question, often asked in the form, Was Paul addressing Jews or
Gentiles? The answer identies the frame of reference within which
Paul was thinking and with which we must work if we are to
understand his thinking. Particularly in the case of Romans 14,
however, it is comparatively easy to read the text as a universal
theological statement whose context is of quite minor importance.
Then the question of audience is reduced to a question of the
context within which Paul was developing his thought. The audience is a readership.
Detailed exegesis normally proceeds with virtually no attention
to Paul's audience. The tacitly presumed audience is The Reader, a
mind interested in the apostle's ideas. This is matched by the tacit
assumption that Paul's aim was to bring to expression or communicate his ideas. Heil's reader-response exposition illustrates this.60
Heil carefully places Paul in his historical setting and discusses
60
Paul's Letter to the Romans.
97
issues shaping his thought. In contrast, he describes the readers, the

Romans, in less historical detail, placing more emphasis on categories from rhetoric in his discussion of reader response. In his
detailed discussion of the text, the audience appears as Universal
Man, responding to the ideas with feelings as well as with intellect.
In more traditional exegesis, the assumption concerning Romans
14 tends to be that Paul is addressing theological exposition to the
Romans whom he has not met, and periodically turning aside to
deal with problems or objections by addressing an Interlocutor, in
the style of the diatribe as it was understood on the basis of
Bultmann's work. Guerra's is an example of a more focussed
treatment,61 interrelating questions of content, purpose and audience. He does not, however, break out of a static model in which
certain elements in Paul's letter can be related to certain elements in
the Romans' situation, such as Jewish-Christian suspicion of Paul's
gospel, or relationships with the civil authorities.
This treatment of audience corresponds to the way scholars write
for a readership rather than an audience. We decide on our readership and write accordingly. For instance, we explain background
more fully in a book for the interested lay person, or quote in the
original languages for scholars. We may also, sometimes almost
unconsciously, vary our prose style or mode of argument to
accommodate different readerships. Once the readership is decided,
the path is set. It does not require detailed attention as we proceed.
This pattern reveals its weakness even within mainstream exegesis by producing some extraordinary results. There are readings
that have Paul demonstrating its need for the gospel to an audience
which exists by virtue of the fact that all its members are among
those few in their world who have accepted it. This is a major
element of the difculty that led Morris to accept the suggestion
that Paul was writing to the Romans as Romans, not as Christians62 a piece of scholarly sleight of hand that would surely have
startled Paul considerably.
Dunn's commentary represents a pioneering venture into exegesis
with real reference to Paul's audience. He refers to the audience
frequently, but in a manner which suggests that it has not occurred
to him to think through the question. He begins with a blunt
statement that Paul is writing to Gentiles, but by the end of the
61
Romans, e.g. x, 1, 126, 136, 143.

The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, 65; Godet, Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle
to the Romans, I, 1489, referring to Hofman.
62
98
next paragraph has Paul aware of the ethnic composition of the

churches in Rome and feeling a need to provide counsel about how
Jew and Gentile in the church should perceive their relationship (p.
xlv). His comprehensive study of the information available about
the church in Rome brings him to a picture of a church originally
rooted in synagogue communities and still not clearly distinguished
from the Jewish community, but with a large Gentile majority and
a Jewish minority with good reason to feel themselves vulnerable,
so that Paul felt a need `to warn his gentile readers against any
feelings of superiority over their Jewish fellows' (p. liii). This
context makes something of a puzzle of the vigour with which Paul
deals with the Jews' false presumption of ethnic privilege in
Romans 24, certainly not taking care of their vulnerability!
He calls Romans à letter to be read out as live exposition, and to
be heard (and understood) at one or two sittings' (p. xiii). This
makes explicit the presupposition of the debate that the letter is
exposition. It also states the generally accepted fact that it would
have been read out to the Romans. Unusually, Dunn carries this
awareness into his commentary, and often refers to the audience as
listeners or hearers (for example pp. 104, 140). He even has an aside
on Rom. 3.9: `. . . though, of course, the way the text was read out
would help inform the sense' (p. 158). On the other hand, sometimes they become readers (for example p. 105), even a readership
(p. 158). At Rom. 3.2, they are to respond to logia as à gentile
readership' (p. 138). Facing up to Rom. 1.23 they become `readers
and listeners' (p. 72). Does this mean that those who read out the
letter to the house churches warrant special mention here?
Dunn generally shows Paul's audience as being instructed. This
matches his perception of the text as exposition. On the other hand,
phrases such as à pricking of the balloon of Jewish presumption'
(p. 108) presuppose a desire to change attitudes, and by head-on
attack. At Rom. 3.1 `the slightly agonized cry of Jewish self-identity
responds in bewildered protest' (p. 138). The diatribe is more interactive. Paul is doing more than talk to his audience. This raises the
question of the way he was hoping they would respond.
Dunn's attempt to take account of the audience is a laudable
advance in exegetical practice. His infelicities and most readers'
failure to notice his treatment of audience are indicators of the state
of the debate.63 They show us how great an effort will be required
63
Even Stowers, with a specialist interest, examines Dunn's introductory state-
99
to read Paul's letters as consistent address to their audiences rather

than as exposition which needed only to be accessible to The
Reader of his time and place.
At this stage, we need to identify more closely our question
about the audience. The historical-critical ideal is sometimes expressed by saying that we try to understand the text as the Romans,
Paul's rst-century audience, would have understood it. This places
the exegete with the historical audience as actual recipients over
against Paul as sender. We are placing ourselves with Paul. Since
we are interested in Paul's intention and in the letter as Paul's, we
are not at present concerned with the question of how accurately
his perception of the audience matched the actual Roman congregation/s.64 Accordingly, the text will be a more important source
than other historical information.
Ong has said that the writer's audience is always a ction.65 Since
the writer has readers or a readership, not an audience, he holds
that the writer has to ctionalize an audience in order to write. This
is true, in its degree, of even the most personal letter, since the
writer does not know, for example, how the person will be feeling
when the letter is read. This ctionalizing of the audience, then, is
part of the textuality of Romans. Our concern with the ctionalized
rather than with the actual audience focusses our teleological
exposition on Paul and the response he was hoping to elicit from
that audience.
To develop our picture of Paul's ctionalized audience we have
two main kinds of information. One is our view of the Eastern
church as Paul knew it and of the Roman church. A letter-writer's
ctionalized audience is not a fantasy, but a more or less unconsciously held view of the actual addressees. The other is the content
of the letter, which offers some direct information on the way Paul
saw the Romans and also provides the agenda. The concerns he
was talking about would contribute to the way he ctionalized his
audience.
Apart from the unique church in Jerusalem, Paul's experience
was mainly of the house churches of his own mission eld. Our
sources give us no reason to suppose that his experience of the
church at Antioch or what he had heard about the church in Rome
ments about audience, but not his treatment in the exegesis (A Rereading of Romans,
223).
64
See Sumney, Identifying Paul's Opponents, 116.
65
`The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction', 5978.
100
would cause him to correct his expectation of something similar in

Rome. Concretely, the ctionalized audience would probably
consist of three or four dozen people, perhaps a household or two,
or a household and some friends, gathered in somebody's house.66
(The geography of Rome, the history of the synagogues, and the
references to households in Romans 16 all suggest that there would
probably be several such gatherings, but we need not suppose that
Paul was particularly conscious of this as he addressed them. In the
letter, he was always treating the Roman church as enough of a
unity to be addressed as one.) There would be some known faces,
but in the letter Paul seems more concerned to reach out to the
unknown ones. He would have addressed many such gatherings in
the course of his mission. Acts 20.712 suggests that he was
capable of talking at length, and had listeners who were willing and
able to attend to him. This constitutes a private rather than a public
setting for what Paul was saying. He was not addressing a large
assembly, but speaking to a small group such as he knew.67
The letter makes it clear that he was thinking of them as Jews
and Gentiles together (for example Rom. 15.713). We need to
consider this. Paul was addressing believers in Christ, but his letters
suggest that he thought of the churches as consisting of Jews and
Gentiles (for example Gal. 2.1415; Rom. 11.13). This is different
from our categories of Jew, Jewish Christian, Gentile, Gentile
Christian. The churches of the fties were moving towards being
`Christianity'. The concepts `Christianity' and `Christian' are so
formative in our thinking that it is hard to empathize with Paul's
conception of the churches as made up of Jews and Gentiles, not
Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. This is a critically important element of the culture gap between us and Paul, existing as
it does at the point where we feel that we are on common ground
with Paul, standing in a Christian context, however different from
his. Accordingly, we shall avoid using the term `Christian' except in
modern contexts, and we shall not use the terms `Jewish Christian'
and `Gentile Christian' at all. In using the terms `Jew' and `Gentile'
to refer to the Roman believers, we shall also recognize that they do
not represent clear-cut attitudes or consistent collections of characteristics. We know that Jews and Gentiles of the time were
variously related to one another's cultures, and we could expect
66
Murphy-O'Connor, St. Paul's Corinth, 1538.

See Stowers, `Social Status, Public Speaking and Private Teaching: The
Circumstances of Paul's Preaching Activity'.
67
101
that on the issues Paul was discussing in Romans, attitudes would

differ. For instance, the Jews Prisca and Aquila might be less
bound by the requirements of the ritual law than some of the
Gentiles who had been associated with the synagogue before they
received the gospel, and see the questions about the role of the law
in a different light.68 Taking Paul seriously in this way will create
some difculties and require some effort, but it will help us to enter
into his perception of his audience.
Our study in chapter 6 raised the questions of whose was the
problem about God's righteousness in justifying believers apart
from the covenant, and what kind of problem it was. It is part of
the problem of the church's relationship to Judaism, which
emerged as a practical problem but was identied as a theological
problem literally, a problem about God. Theoretically, there
would be three possible lines of solution. First, the gospel, being
God's fullment of Israel's election, could be the ingathering of the
Gentiles. Then believers would remain within Judaism. Against
that solution was the church's experience that the Holy Spirit was
given apart from the covenant, and many Diaspora churches were
predominantly Gentile. Second, the church could be a new people
of God replacing Israel, so that the old covenant was superseded.
Against it was the undoubted rooting of gospel and church in
Israel, and the fact that a God who abandoned the chosen people
could not be trusted, so that such a gospel would not be good news.
Paul's view that the gospel was threatened where Gentile believers
accepted law and circumcision was apparently seen as denying
God's faithfulness, as well as encouraging antinomianism and
immorality.
For Paul, the saving power of the gospel was action of Israel's
God whom he knew. He would not ask whether God was faithful
in this new action, but how. This brought about a radical
reappraisal of his understanding of God's action with Israel,
creating radical alteration in his self-understanding, his identity as
a Jew. Thus, the pastoral dimension of the problem was not simply
at the level of who might eat with whom and under what conditions. The vindication of God's righteousness entailed a new selfunderstanding for Jewish believers, and demanded care for them
from the Gentiles. This is a deeper and more disturbing issue than
68
Wilckens, Der Brief an die Romer, I, 3941; Dunn, `The Incident at Antioch';
Barclay, `Paul among Diaspora Jews', 928.
102
the comparatively only comparatively! external questions about

the law. In whatever terms this could be recognized in Paul's
culture, it was a pastoral challenge.
Part of the way the roles of preacher and congregation appear in
the text is that Paul's approach differs from the one we tend to
assume. With the presupposition of theological exposition goes the
idea that he was giving the Romans an account of his gospel, with
some element of apologetic. He was hoping to persuade them of the
validity or acceptability of his view, and they would judge whether
or not his case was convincing. Some expositors nd in the letter
traces of Paul's difdence in writing to the Romans. This view is
subject to Campbell's objection that Paul would hardly have
submitted his gospel to the Romans for assessment.69 It also fails to
sit comfortably with the identications of the text as epideictic or
protreptic. It is clearly not how Paul understood what he was
doing. He was not presenting a proposal or arguing a case, but
preaching the gospel. His `solution' to the `problem' was integral to
the gospel he was called to preach. Far from trying to persuade
judges of the validity of his view, he was leading fellow-believers
into this dimension of the gospel and their obedience to it, and
doing so with the authority of the apostle of God to the Gentiles.
This included showing them where they were wrong in attitudes or
views they might have been holding, consciously or unconsciously
(for example Rom. 2.1724; 11.1322).
Reading on the presupposition that Paul was preaching with
authority to a committed and co-operative audience is difcult in
the context of a debate in which conict has the status of an
hermeneutical key. In the debate on Romans, this hermeneutical
key is sometimes used with full awareness, as when Paul is seen to
be dealing with opposition to himself or his views that had already
reached Rome. Perhaps more often, it is not recognized, but the
habits of mind of modern Western adversarial academic debate are
unconsciously laid on Paul and his work. It is of the essence of our
academic debate that each writer is trying to convince a critical
audience which includes peers who will want to argue against this
case and put up alternative views. We can see such a process
operating, for instance, in Michel's proposal that Romans is a
Lehrbrief in which Paul defends himself against charges of denying
69
`Why did Paul Write Romans?', 2645.
103
the advantages of Israel and opening the way to antinomianism.70

The question of whether some of the Romans saw themselves as
Paul's peers and wanted to judge his effort is outside our present
concern. To understand the letter as Paul's preaching, we need to
see how he perceived the relationship. He addressed the Romans as
an apostle commissioned by God (Rom. 1.1), whose responsibility
included them (Rom. 1.56, 1115; 15.1416). He saw himself as
having authority to commend them (Rom. 6.17), and guide them
(Rom. 14.115.7). He was realistic and tactful in not handling that
authority inappropriately (Rom. 1.12; 15.1415, 223), but he did
not let it slip away. Thus, resisting habits of mind formed in the
mainstream debate is part of the challenge the text offers us.
The last item in our examination of the way Paul ctionalized his
audience is his expectation of the ways the letter might be received.
We have suggested that the Romans would have heard conicting
reports about Paul, doubtless ranging from the very favourable
view of Prisca and Aquila, who had been willing to risk their necks
for him (Rom. 16.34), to energetic condemnation. Further, the
Roman believers would have had varying backgrounds in Judaism,
the Gentile world and JewGentile contacts. Thus, while he
preached with his proper authority he would be expecting a variety
of attitudes towards himself and his preaching. He was talking to
people, and we shall narrow our responses if we think of him
addressing a `problem' or a `situation'.
We can examine Paul's intention in relation to his Roman
audience by using the concepts of implied author and implied
reader developed in reception theories of reading. These are applied
to NT studies in reader-response and narrative criticism. Fowler
presents a useful set of gures.71 A text is written by a real author
and read by real readers Paul and the Romans. It generates an
implied author and an implied reader (in the case of Romans, an
implied audience), who are gures within the text. They are
necessarily at characters, since only those aspects of a person that
are activated by the text appear. A text may include a narratee,
who is distanced from the implied reader, and therefore subject to
her observation. An example is the Objector in the Bultmannian
view of diatribe in Paul, observed by the implied audience, the
Roman church as Paul ctionalized it. There may be, correspond70
Der Brief an die Romer, 301.

`Who is ``the Reader'' in Reader Response Criticism?', 1011; Let the Reader
Understand, 316.
71
104
ingly, a narrator apart from the implied author. In the diatribal

exchanges in Romans, the implied author would also be the
narrator in relation to the Objector as narratee.
We can apply these roles to Romans. Paul is the real author. The
implied author we call The Apostle. This is the way we nd Paul
presenting himself to the Romans. He is called by God as apostle
(Rom. 1.1). His task is to preach the gospel in order to bring about
the obedience of faith among the Gentiles (Rom. 1.56), and that is
what he is doing in this letter (Rom. 15.1516). As apostle, he
speaks with authority, and is condent about his message. We
notice the style of his authority. His rst description of himself is as
doyloq Xristoy ! Ihsoy, a characterization that each of the
Romans could have claimed.72 His authority is exercised within the
common allegiance to Christ as Lord, so it is not of the kind that
lords it over others. He treats the Romans with respect and asks for
their support, especially as intercessors. We have noted explicit
signs of his authority in the text. We note also the tone of one
commissioned to say something that has a serious claim on the
listeners' attention and obedience. He speaks as a Jew who has
learnt something profoundly and disturbingly new about Israel's
God, and wants the Romans to enter into that new truth in the
ways appropriate to them.
Kingsbury's denition of the implied reader is helpful: `[t]he
implied reader is that imaginary person in whom the intention of
the text is to be thought of as always reaching its fullment'.73 The
implied audience of Romans is a community of Jewish and Gentile
believers who are learning to live together in Christ. The Apostle
respects it and rejoices in it. It is an open and attentive audience,
with serious questions about the issues under discussion, and
willing to make an effort to understand the preaching. It has that
proper humility which is willing to learn and open to change. By
the end of the letter it will have increased freedom and harmony in
JewGentile relationships. We call the implied audience The Congregation.
We have examined the evidence that Paul was doing all he could
to reach across the time-space gap between himself and the
72
While some scholars, such as Stuhlmacher (Der Brief an die Romer, 21), see this
as a claim to authority, Dunn (Romans, 7) points out its application to many
believers in the NT.
73
Matthew as Story, 38.
105
Romans. In the process, he was doing all he could to create that

implied audience out of each group of real listeners in Rome.
We have been considering the audience Paul was intending to
address in Romans as a whole. What of Rom. 1.164.25? Here,
especially, a number of scholars have found the argument so Jewish
as to see it in dialogue with the synagogue. In the terms in which we
have been discussing audience, The Congregation is invited in this
passage to observe and learn from The Apostle's engagement with
a narratee whom we call The Conservative.
What brought us to this hypothesis? Reading the passage attentively to discover what audience is being addressed, we nd features
that mark it out from its context in this letter and the Pauline
corpus. There the speaker is constantly engaging and including the
audience. Verbs are often rst or second person plural, the Romans
are addressed as a!delfoi (Rom. 7.1, 4; 8.12; 10.1; 12.1; 15.14, 30;
16.17), there are questions, there are phrases such as oi damen de
and a!gnoeite. In Rom. 1.164.25, in contrast, most of the terms of
address are in the diatribe passages, and there is lavish use of the
second person singular while there is none of the second person
plural as address. Until very recently, exegetes have usually treated
these diatribe passages as a rhetorical or debating device in which
Paul turns from the Romans to address an imaginary interlocutor.
Once we envisage Paul having in his mind's eye a small group of
believers in a private house, this becomes difcult to accept. This
view of diatribe belongs rather to the market place. Far from
turning aside from the audience, the diatribal elements in Romans
tend to sharpen the address to the audience. Diatribal minidialogues or addresses were used as a teaching device,74 as is clearly
illustrated in Seneca and Epictetus. There they are often parts of a
much longer address to an individual.75 They are used like that in
Rom. 1.164.25 to handle matters that are particularly difcult
for the listener, who has been understanding God's election in
terms of privilege. Thus, Rom. 2.15 brings home the judgement of
Rom. 1.1832 to such a judging person and Rom. 2.1724
challenges his view of Israel's boast over against the Gentiles by
showing how Jewish sin dishonours God in Gentile eyes. Rom.
74
Stowers, The Diatribe and Paul's Letter to the Romans, e.g. 767, 1824.
e.g. Seneca, Ep. 66.40 includes an example of a response to an objector, while
14, 18, 38 are among numerous examples of Seneca raising Lucilius' expected
objection himself and answering it. In Epictetus an objector is invoked in II.23.16,
for instance.
75
106
3.274.2 opens Paul's demonstration that the gospel of grace,

which seemed to overturn God's election of Israel, is the fullment
of God's electing purpose. Rom. 3.18 is often seen as an example
of Paul hard-pressed by an objector, but it is more intelligible when
one recognizes that the speaker, not the debating partner, has the
initiative. These diatribal passages are unusually long for Paul, and
form a major part of the passage. Further, the dio of Rom. 2.1
follows from Rom. 1.1832, the description of God's righteous
judgement in Rom. 2.611 continues the sentence that begins in
Rom. 2.5, the second person singular address of Rom. 2.1724
continues in the question and answer discussion of circumcision in
Rom. 2.257, and Rom. 3.1 arises from Rom. 2.1729. When we
read with our ears and recognize the sound of a speaking voice in
the text, these diatribal passages t naturally into the ow of speech
as highlights of an address to an individual at the high points of his
questioning of what is being said.
The last explicit address to the Romans, the implied audience, is
in Rom. 1.15. Then the preacher begins turning to the conservative
believer, framing his address in terms of Jewish questions and
Jewish presuppositions. This is particularly noticeable in Romans
2. The root of the exegetical problems in this chapter is that the
whole discussion proceeds on Jewish presuppositions that seem,
from where we stand, to be pre-Christian. Whatever the details of
their interpretations, exegetes are agreed that in Romans 4
Abraham is claimed as a witness for Paul's view. The preacher
begins turning back to the implied audience in Rom. 4.235, where
`we' is `we believers' whose lives are determined by God's fullment
of the promise. In Rom. 5.1, there is again direct address to the
implied audience.
These features of the text are best explained by hypothesizing
address to a narratee. This gure becomes the recipient of a whole,
coherent discussion, not of a series of asides from a discussion
which becomes fragmented when they are taken seriously as asides.
We call him The Conservative. Viewed in this way, the passage is
an example of what Graeco-Roman rhetoricians called prosvpopoiia/prosopopoeia, speech in character.76 Stowers, reading within
a different framework, sees two successive examples, address to an
imaginary Gentile in Rom. 2.116 and a discussion with a Jew who
76
Often, but less helpfully, translated ìmpersonation'. Quintilian, Institutes
IX.2.2932; Kennedy, Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors, 64; Stowers, A
Rereading of Romans, 1621.
107
has taken it upon himself to teach Gentiles in Rom. 2.174.22/23.

He notes the return to address to Paul's epistolary audience
towards the end of Romans 4.77
How did Paul expect this to work? We have noted that he would
have expected the Romans to have varied views on the issues, and
varied attitudes towards himself. At the level of the text, we observe
that the implied author, The Apostle, is preaching the message
entrusted to him by God to a called and strong community of the
saints, The Congregation. He has indicated his eagerness to preach
to them. With the confessional formula oy! . . . e!paisxynomai (Rom.
1.16a), he has conjured up the common experience of confessing
the faith in the face of opposition, or at least lack of sympathy. He
has stood with them, and encouraged them to see themselves as
standing with him. In Rom. 1.1617 there follows a clear statement
of the gospel as the power of God for salvation panti tCv
pisteyonti, ! IoydaiCv te prvton kai % Ellhni. That is controversial.
It conrms what they have heard about The Apostle. In the rest of
Rom. 1.164.25, he works through what it means for the person
who will have most difculty in coming to terms with it, the
conservative believer who believes, either as a Jew or as a Gentile
with a strong commitment to Jewish ways, that the proper Gentile
response to the gospel is to believe it and to act on the conviction
that doing so effectively makes one into a Jew, a member of the
people to whom the promise was given. By speaking in this way,
The Apostle gives the individual members of The Congregation the
opportunity to receive and relate to what he is saying according to
the way it encounters them in their particular situations. This
procedure also takes seriously the very real difculties that many of
his contemporaries obviously had with Paul's gospel. Nobody is
being ridden over rough-shod. This picture is quite sufciently
credible to be taken into our hypothesis about the nature of the
whole we are reading in Rom. 1.164.25.
The four statements we have explicated in this chapter give us
our hypothesis about the nature of the text. Romans is a letter
which was dictated and intended to be read aloud to the gathered
church. In teleological reading, therefore, we are seeking what Paul
was intending the Romans to hear when the text was rst read to
them. As a letter for reading aloud, it participates in the nature of
speech, and therefore we must make sense of it as speech. We must
77
A Rereading of Romans, 368; ch. 4.
108
make sense of all of the text in sequence, assuming that there is a

single strand of address that is simple enough for listeners to
follow. `Simple' here means ùncomplicated', not èasy'. It need not
have been easy for the Romans, and as listeners-in we may well nd
it difcult. The oral-aural context requires us to allow ourselves to
be guided by aural markers in the text, and when we encounter a
difcult or obscure construction, to take the meaning that would be
most immediately obvious to a listener. We identify the text as
preaching, not theological exposition, and believe that Paul understood himself to be speaking with authority to a co-operative audience, not with some difdence to an adversarial one. Rom. 1.164.25
is addressed to the Roman believers mainly via a narratee who is a
believer responding to the gospel from within a conservative Jewish
frame of reference. Using the personae we have established, we shall
take the teleological exposition as reading The Apostle's preaching
to The Congregation, mostly via The Conservative. The fact that
we still have the causal reading to come will free us from trying to
deal with all the problems of the text, or attempting to grasp all the
meaning it contains, so that we can concentrate on that element of
meaning in the text that represents Paul's intention.
9
H Y P O T H E SI S D E S C R I B I N G R O M A N S
1.16 4.25
Developing a teleological reading of Rom. 1.164.25, we complete

our work in the whole sector of the hermeneutical circle by
formulating an hypothesis describing the whole we are reading.
Following our work in chapter 3, we need to describe what it is
about and what kind of text it is. This hypothesis, consciously
developed and used, will provide a new basic conception to guide
our detailed reading. The studies in chapters 68, of the issue at
stake, Paul's purpose and the nature of the text, provide the
material.
Our hypothesis will be tested by the teleological reading it yields.
By denition this does not deal with all of the meaning in the text,
so it will not be comparable with readings in the mainstream
debate, and therefore cannot be effectively tested against them.
Before we offer it as our best answer to the question of what Paul
was intending the Romans to hear when the text was read to them,
we shall subject it to three tests. It must account for all of the text,1
making sense of it in sequence and without demanding impossible
feats of comprehension from rst-century listeners in the Roman
church. This involves overcoming the problems identied in
chapter 2. We must be able to see it as an intelligible part of the
whole meaning of Romans. This requires that we can see it as the
rst stage of Paul's preaching and also as compatible with the
justication account as a related element of meaning. It must either
be something we can accept that Paul could have said in the
situation or force us to ask reasonable questions about our understanding of the situation and/or of Paul.
In describing the basic conception with which the mainstream
debate operates, we can distinguish between what kind of text this
is and what it is about. It is theological exposition; it is about
1
See above, pp. 423.
109
110
justication. We shall formulate our hypothesis by considering

rst the nature of the text and then what it is about, but recognize
that the identication of the text as preaching precludes a clear
separation.
Rom. 1.164.25 is the rst stage in a preaching of the gospel by
Paul, apostle of God to the Gentiles, to the believers in Rome,
establishing contact by beginning his ministry with them. We called
the text preaching because we saw that Paul was addressing the
gospel to these believers, not talking to them about it. Preaching to
believers is expressing the way the gospel addresses them in their
situation. The preacher seeks to engage feelings and wills as well as
minds. Paul's particular purpose was to help the Roman believers
to own and act on his insight that the gospel calls Jew and Gentile
in Christ to welcome one another. He preached with the authority
of God's apostle, treating the Romans as a committed and cooperative audience, open to receive help with some of the difculties of this gospel demand. He dealt with problems and objections,
but he did not respond to objectors on their terms. They might
have raised the issues, but he formulated the questions and set them
in their proper contexts.
The context of this preaching was the church's struggle to work
out its relationship with Judaism as believing Jews and Gentiles
came together in Christ. The touch-stone issue was the role of the
Torah, mark of Israel's identity as God's covenant people. Our
study of the Roman churches suggests that they would be experiencing the tensions themselves and have an interest in the problem for
the whole church. The letter indicates that Paul saw the Roman
church as healthy, working with the stressful issues but not beyond
valuing the guidance he was called to offer. Clearly, he held that
Gentile believers should not become Jews. The letters show this as a
decision based on God's action in Christ. It attracted two major
criticisms: it implied that God had abandoned the election of Israel
and thus was no God; it encouraged lawlessness and immorality.
Paul was preaching to Roman believers who had heard about his
view, but not from him, and whose own experience would give rise
to a variety of views on the subject. For Paul, his view was not one
among a number of approaches to a problem, but an integral part
of the gospel God had called him to preach to the Gentiles.
In chapter 7 we saw that in Rom. 1.164.25 Paul was grounding
his preaching in God's saving action, showing that God had
fullled the election of Israel in a way that removed the distinction
111
between Jew and Gentile in the matter of salvation. Negatively, this

would remove a barrier to mutual acceptance. Positively, it would
show God's action as carrying with it the demand for mutual
acceptance.
Knowing that his audience would have varying ideas about the
gospel, Jewish tradition and himself, Paul preached this part of his
message as address to the kind of listener most likely to nd it
unacceptable, a believer responding to the gospel from a conservative Jewish position. This narratee we call The Conservative. Thus
Paul gave the Romans the position of onlookers, and onlookers
whom he had done all he could to gather to his side in the
discussion. The Conservative's position is one that Paul and others
of his ocks had experienced themselves. He knew what it was like
to realize and respond to the newness of God's action in Christ. As
preacher, he was not theologizing about God's action from a
neutral standpoint, but was with other believers, living through the
unclarity and day-to-day problems inseparable from the obedience
of faith. His pastoral aim was to give The Conservative the freedom
to receive and live out a new vision of Israel's God and,
inevitably, of Israel, including himself. The Romans could respond
to the discussion in ways appropriate to them, moving towards the
freedom Paul was seeking for them.
This passage is about God's righteousness. In its preaching
context, Rom. 1.1617 is a claim that the salvation offered in the
gospel is indeed for all who believe with no other requirement, and
this is revelation of God's righteousness. It includes the election of
Israel. The language establishes the framework of the preaching as
the familiar one of salvation at God's eschatological judgement.
This claim raised major questions. How could God be righteous as
Israel's covenant God if he justied believers without distinguishing
between Jew and Gentile? How could he then be righteous as
eschatological judge, which involved saving Israel and condemning
the wicked?
Rom. 1.183.20 deals with sinners, Jewish and Gentile. The rst
point made is that they are without excuse. In this discussion, sin is
a datum and the conclusions, as far as we could trace them, are
about God's judgement. Paq is used in ways which stress that àll'
is made up of Jew and Gentile. These elements of our exploration
converge at Rom. 3.1920. The Torah places Jew with Gentile so
that the whole world is arraigned before God's judgement (Rom.
3.19). Rom. 3.20 excludes the possibility that the Torah may make
112
Israel different. It brings knowledge of sin. Within this discussion,

Rom. 3.18 examines the apparent abandonment of the covenant if
Jewish sinner is no different from Gentile sinner. Rather than
demonstrating that everybody is a sinner in need of grace, Rom.
1.183.20 is leading The Conservative to recognize that Jewish
sinner is in the same position as Gentile sinner before God's
judgement. This questions his understanding of Israel's election
and of God's righteousness.
Following out the grammar of Rom. 3.216, we found Paul
showing that God is indeed righteous in justifying believers without
distinction between Jew and Gentile. This reverses the question
usually identied in the debate. Paul was not talking about how
sinners could be righteous in God's eyes, which involves the
question of how God could be righteous in justifying them simply
because they believed. Rather, he was talking about how God
could be righteous in the eyes of these particular sinners (Paul and
the Romans) if he justied all of them on the basis of their faith in
Christ without reference to the JewGentile distinction. This involves the question of how God can be righteous as faithful to the
covenant if he over-rides the distinction.
The relationship between Rom. 1.183.20 and Rom. 3.216, plus
the placing of the discussion about God's covenant and righteousness in Rom. 3.18, suggests that the question of God's faithfulness
was being raised at the point where God justied believers without
distinguishing between Jew and Gentile. Paul moved the question
back to the point where their sinful actions have already overridden the distinction. Then the question of God's faithfulness does
not concern elect Israel so much as elect but unfaithful Israel no
unfamiliar question for The Conservative.
Our studies of Paul's purpose and of the nature of the text enable
us to draw a conclusion from our observations in chapter 6 about
paq in Rom. 1.163.26. It is operating to focus universal statements
whose truth is taken for granted on the `we' of the text, The
Apostle, The Conservative and The Congregation in the context of
the believing community of Jews and Gentiles. There is no explicit
concern with whether the paq includes all humanity. This conrms
our suspicion that Paul may have been talking about something
more limited than universal sin and salvation. He was talking about
the way God's saving action affected these particular people. This
coheres with our identication of the text as preaching. It also
solves the problem of the connection between paq (Jew and
113
Gentile) in Rom. 1.183.20 and paq (all believers) in Rom. 3.223.

They are linked by the address to The Conservative. In exegesis, we
may dene the link further. The church context also explains how
sin can be a datum in Rom. 1.183.20. The Conservative thinks in
terms of Jews and `Gentile sinners', but he has accepted Christ as a
i" lasthrion because he is a sinner. The issue was not one of Gentile
believers being sinners over against Jewish believers who were not.
It was about the impact of the gospel on his assumption that Jews
were different before God from Gentiles.
It appears that by Rom. 3.26 Paul had posed and resolved the
question of God's righteousness not by defending God's action, but
by showing it as righteous and as questioning the questions posed
against it. This turns the criticism onto the questioner. If God acts
inconsistently with existing ideas of righteousness, the human being
can either accept the criteria and conclude that God is not righteous, or take it as axiomatic that God is righteous and re-examine
the criteria. The latter, Paul's procedure here, puts the person
under the microscope instead of putting God there. For The
Conservative, it means an overhaul of beliefs about God so deeply
held that he had probably scarcely been aware of them, and with
that an overhaul of his understanding of Israel, and of himself as a
person in relationships, especially with Gentile believers.
In Rom. 3.274.25, three characteristic features of Judaism are
discussed. Paul shows God's action in Christ as establishing or
fullling or reinterpreting monotheism, Torah and God's election
of Abraham. In chapter 6 we noticed elements in this passage that
minimized the JewGentile distinction. We can hypothesize that
The Apostle examines God's past action with Israel in the light of
the new action in Christ and the gospel, and shows the continuity.
In sum, our hypothesis is that Paul was preaching to a committed
and co-operative church about God's righteousness active in Christ
and the gospel as saving power. His presentation had the inseparable aims of showing this as righteous action of Israel's covenant
God, and as making a claim on believers, that they accept the overriding of the JewGentile distinction that had been part of their
world-view and identity. He did this largely by inviting the
members of the congregations to stand with him as he helped a
narratee to respond to the way it challenged his position as a
conservative Jewish believer. This hypothesis identies the text as
part of Paul's apostolic work, not a reection on it.
How shall we use this hypothesis for the teleological reading?
114
Our concern is to identify that element of meaning in the text which

is what Paul intended the listening Romans to hear. We shall
therefore make use of the personae in the text which we identied
in chapter 8. We shall consider what we nd The Apostle saying to
The Congregation, especially as they observe his encounter with
The Conservative. The text is present for us to make these observations, and we shall write in the present tense. Only if the teleological
reading can pass our tests shall we present it in the past tense as our
best answer to the question of what Paul was intending to say to
the Romans in the rst century.
The text requires from us responses appropriate to speech and to
preaching. Applying the criterion of intelligibility, we must accept
the linearity of speech and the speaker's need to provide aural
guides for the hearers. The teleological reading should be sufciently uncomplicated for attentive and involved listeners to follow.
We must set aside the adversarial style of our own work and attend
to Paul as to one preaching with authority to a committed and
responsive congregation.
10
T H E T E L E O L O G I C A L E X P O S I T I O N OF
R O M A N S 1 . 1 6 4. 25
We now move from the whole sector of the hermeneutical circle to

the parts. We begin to test our hypothesis by undertaking the
detailed teleological reading of Rom. 1.164.25, trying to trace the
element of meaning in the text which is what Paul was intending
the Romans to hear when it was being read to them.
This chapter is written in the present tense about what we
nd that The Apostle, the implied author, is preaching to The
Congregation, the implied audience, mostly via address to
The Conservative, the narratee. Only after we have tested our
reading shall we be able to refer to it in the past tense as what Paul
was intending to say to the Romans. It will be our best answer to
that historical question.
We shall take the text in sections, presenting for each a teleological exposition and a methodological commentary. The teleological exposition is an account of what The Apostle is saying to The
Congregation or The Conservative, showing how the text works.
The methodological commentary is concerned primarily with the
way we have arrived at this reading. Interaction with the rest of the
scholarly debate will be kept to a minimum. Our goal and questions
are different from a commentator's.
The challenge of writing and reading this chapter is to concentrate on the task in hand. In seeking what Paul was intending the
Romans to hear, we must focus our attention on this one text, and
attend to it as address to the Romans. We are seeking out one
element, the controlling element, of the meaning. There is more to
explore in the causal reading.
In Rom. 1.116a, Paul established the personae of the text, the
implied author and the implied audience. The implied author is The
Apostle, called by God to preach the gospel to the Gentiles,
including the Romans. The implied audience is The Congregation,
the called and faithful community of the saints in Rome, to whom
115
116
he is obligated and with whom he is hoping for a fruitful visit. The

negative confessional formula oy! . . . e!paisxynomai (Rom. 1.16a)
implies not that he might be ashamed, but that he confesses and
preaches Christ even in the face of opposition. We know from the
letters and Acts that persisting in this had often got him into
trouble. To be `not ashamed of the gospel' was a demand placed on
the Romans as well.
Rom. 1.1617 teleological exposition
When we approach this statement asking what The Apostle, the
implied author, is saying to The Congregation, the implied audience in the historical situation we have been describing, we are
struck by its clarity and boldness. It will make The Congregation
sit up and ask questions.
There is nothing controversial about saying that the gospel is
God's power for salvation, but the rest amounts to a claim that
salvation is for all who believe without any other condition, and
this is because (gar, Rom. 1.17a) of the nature of the gospel,
which is God's revelation of his righteousness in a sphere of faith.
This revelation includes the election of Israel ( ! IoydaiCv te prvton
kai % Ellhni, Rom. 1.16b) and fulls the word of her prophet (Rom.
1.17c). The Congregation will not ask what The Apostle means by
pistiq or dikaiosynh ueoy. They will hear a statement that
believing the gospel, believing in Christ, is all that is required for
salvation, and that this gospel is the revelation of God's righteousness. It is not merely a demonstration of the fact that God is
righteous. It is dynamiq, powerful action that reveals God's righteousness they might even say, is God's righteousness. The
questions they will ask arise from their understanding of dikaiosynh ueoy. How can the God of this gospel be righteous, since the
action said to reveal this righteousness seems to be an abandonment
of the election of Israel? How does this eschatological judge reveal
the righteousness of Israel's eschatological judge, whose righteousness consists in judging justly and saving his people Israel? In the
context of the church's problem, The Apostle seems to be claiming
to have his cake and eat it too. He is preaching salvation for
everyone who believes, and in the church's experience that category
overlaps only a little with Israel. At the same time, he is saying that
this gospel is the righteous action of the God who elected Israel
from among the nations, and whose righteousness therefore con-
117
sists at least partly in faithfulness to Israel. How will he make good

this claim?
We need to look more closely at the way he has built up this
picture. The language dynamiq, svthria, a!pokalyptetai,
zhsetai, dikaiosynh orients The Congregation towards a
preaching in the familiar framework of the eschatological judgement. The gospel was preached as offering salvation at that
judgement. This meant that those who accepted it would be given
the verdict Dikaioq and enter upon the blessings of salvation. In
this preaching, God appears in the role of eschatological judge.
When The Apostle says panti tCv pisteyonti, The Congregation
will not hear a statement of the universality of the gospel. Rather,
within their own context, they will hear this preacher saying, as he
is known to claim, that all you have to do in receiving the gospel is
to believe. Concretely, Gentile believers do not have to become
Jews. Hardly have The Congregation taken in this point than it is
followed by another which sounds inconsistent with it: ! IoydaiCv te
prvton kai % Ellhni. To put the Jew rst is to claim that the gospel
includes the election of Israel. Surely you can have one or the other,
but not both!
The Apostle says that the gospel is this saving power because
God's righteousness is revealed in it. The Congregation's understanding of the righteousness of the God of Israel, their saviour,
includes as a major element the idea that it is a saving force. At the
same time it resists the idea of action that would over-ride the
election of Israel, as this insistence on faith seems to do. The
righteousness of the God of the covenant by denition includes
faithfulness to the covenant. The Apostle, however, goes on to
underline again the centrality of faith. In this gospel, God's righteousness is revealed e!k pistevq ei! q pistin. This revelation is in a
sphere of faith, and that is where one must be to encounter it.
Furthermore, the word of the prophet testies to it: `The one who is
righteous by faith shall live.' Thus, The Apostle describes God's
righteousness in terms of action that seems to question God's
righteousness as elect Israel understands it. In the same breath, he
is claiming that it is the fullment of a word of one of Israel's
prophets.
At this stage, according to our hypothesis, The Apostle is still
addressing the implied audience, The Congregation, but already
has an eye to the narratee, The Conservative. The language of the
preaching here, the language of eschatological judgement, is very
118
Jewish. So, necessarily, was the language of the debate about

whether Gentiles who believed had to become Jews. We have
framed the two major questions The Congregation will ask within
that framework. They would not mean quite the same to all the
members. Gentiles who were tempted to see the church as replacing
Israel (Rom. 11.1324) might feel that this statement was pulling
them back into a past they had thought they had left behind,
whereas to Prisca and Aquila and others who thought like Paul, it
could seem a helpful and challenging way of saying it. To The
Conservative it would seem suspiciously like a contradiction in
terms. How could God be righteous in action that seemed to
abandon Israel's election? The question was there for all of them, in
various forms. It is perhaps The Conservative who will most want
to ask how this could be the righteous action of Israel's eschatological judge.
Rom. 1.1617 methodological commentary
Our teleological exposition looks very different from the expositions
usual in commentaries. This is partly because of its different goal,
since many of the questions the commentators ask would belong to
causal exposition, and partly because of the different identications
of Paul's purpose and the nature of the text. The reader will notice,
however, that our reading depends on the historical scholarship
which also undergirds more traditional exegeses. It draws on that
work differently because our questions are different.
We treated the two verses as a single claim to which The Apostle
intends The Congregation to respond, not as exposition intended to
be understood analytically. In the two kinds of writing and the two
kinds of exposition appropriate to them, we see words working in
different ways in the different kinds of communication. When the
text is taken as theological exposition, we are usually dealing with
concepts, which are complex. Our concept `faith', for instance, has
elements of intellectual assent, trust, the substance of the gospel,
lived commitment. As far as we can see from the literature, Paul's
and the Romans' concept `pistiq' was similar, but with a larger
element of faithfulness, which is more marginal to our `faith'
concept, appearing in phrases like `keeping faith'. When we analyse
Rom. 1.1617 as theological exposition, we nd that salvation is
for all who believe, that righteousness is tied up with faith. This
raises the question, What is faith? The answer is a substantial
119
demonstration of the content and range of the concept. In contrast,

when `faith'/`pistiq' is used in a particular situation, there will be
referents in the context to guide the response. When, in the
situation we have indicated, The Apostle says panti tCv pisteyonti
to The Congregation, they will hear this against the background of
the debate about whether believing in Christ is all that is necessary
for salvation, or Gentile believers must also become Jews. The
appropriate response then is that `faith' means believing in Christ.
As listeners-in, we need to note that the contrast between (passive)
believing and (active) obedience which has shaped our responses
was not part of the context in which this was spoken and heard.
Given our cultural distance from this text, we need to understand
the rst-century concepts in order to hear the words in their
particular contexts accurately. When we come to the causal exposition, we shall be dealing with the underlying theology and shall
need to explore the concepts.
The treatment of the term dikaiosynh ueoy in the teleological
exposition is strikingly different from treatments in the mainstream
debate. There, the presupposition that the text is some kind of
justication account means that exegetes assume that the primary
concern is with human righteousness. This is true even when the
exegete stresses that the justication of believers is a revelation of
God's righteousness.1 Much of the debate about dikaiosynh ueoy
starts from the assumption that the phrase refers, at least in part, to
righteousness received by the believer. Because of our explorations
in chapters 69, we see the term here as referring to God's own
righteousness, making a controversial claim about it. Again, our
response here is not to explore the concept of righteousness, but to
see `righteousness' in the light of the referents in the situation. The
Apostle is talking about the righteousness of the God of the
covenant and of the eschatological judge. The tests of his claim,
then, are that God can be seen as faithful to the covenant, and
righteous as judge. The latter involves being impartial and judging
according to what people have done, saving Israel and condemning
the wicked.
It may be objected that in the tradition and in Paul's usage
elsewhere, dikaiosynh ueoy is God's saving power and has nothing
to do with at least the negative side of judgement, condemnation
and punishment.
1
e.g. the commentaries of Barrett, Kasemann, Stuhlmacher.
120
If our reading proved to be inconsistent with Paul's usage

elsewhere, we should have to think again. We are dealing with this
text not in isolation from its historical context, but precisely as part
of one of Paul's letters. On our method, however, we cannot apply
this test at this stage. We must follow where the text takes us and
only when we have completed the whole passage ask whether our
reading is consistent with Paul's usage elsewhere, or whether it even
throws new light on his usage elsewhere. This will be part of the
testing of the teleological reading. For now, we merely note that
interpretation of Paul's usage elsewhere is dominated by the kinds
of presuppositions that we are questioning.
The objection that our reading is ruled out by the tradition
requires an immediate decision. The tradition would provide
common ground between The Apostle, The Congregation and The
Conservative, so if our reading is inconsistent with it we must think
again before we continue. Can the claim that in the case of God
dikaiosynh refers only to saving action stand? In the tradition,
dikaiosynh when applied to people covered a variety of activities,
including righteousness in judgement. What constituted righteousness in judges among God's covenant people was determined by
God's righteousness.2 It is therefore very bold to claim that when
dikaiosynh was applied to God it did not refer to God's role as
judge, or referred only to part of it. There are texts in the tradition
which show that righteousness terminology was used in connection
with God's action as judge. In Greek texts, dikaiosynh and other
words from the same root appear.3 It is true that it could be
described with other vocabulary,4 but it is not true that righteousness language was avoided.
Kasemann argues that dikaiosynh ueoy was an expression that
Paul drew from the tradition.5 This could be the basis of an
argument against our reading if dikaiosynh ueoy were a xed
technical term with a specic meaning. Kasemann, however, does
not argue on that basis but treats a wide-ranging sample of Paul's
dikai-vocabulary as part of his use of this expression.
Rom. 3.45; 2.511 reinforce the evidence that God's righteousness was understood as including judicial righteousness. Since
2
Ps. 72 (LXX 71).14; Deut. 1.1617; Lev. 19.15.

Ps. 51.4 (LXX 50.6); 98 (LXX 97).9; Wis. 12.1222; 1 Enoch 38; Jub. 21.4; Pss.
Sol. 9.45.
4
e.g. 2 Baruch 44.1215; 54.21; 1 Enoch 1023; 4 Ezra 7.335.
5
`The ``Righteousness of God'' in Paul', 172.
3
121
Paul did not explain his terminology in those passages, it seems

that he did not see it as surprising.
Rom. 1.17b e!k pistevq ei! q pistin: We have taken this as an
emphatic way of saying that God's righteousness is revealed in a
sphere of faith. On our principle of preferring the reading which
would be obvious to the hearer, we have taken the phrase with
a!pokalyptetai. Were the Romans intended to take it as one
emphatic expression or as two separate phrases, presenting something like the basis and the goal of the revelation? In considering
this, we remember that God's righteousness is being revealed in the
gospel. How? Scholars have found a few parallels for the single
phrase, with verbs and with nouns.6 As one of these, the phrase
would be emphatic. In favour of this reading are the facts that
rhetorical stress is a proper part of preaching, and very appropriate
here, and that there is nothing in the context to make a clear
distinction between the two uses of pistiq. Against it is the fact that
the emphatic phrases cited show some logic of progression. It
makes sense to talk about going from strength to strength (Ps. 84.7
[LXX 83.8]) or from evils to evils (Jer. 9.2 LXX). It is hard to make
similar sense of God's righteousness being revealed in the gospel in
a progression from faith to faith.
If Paul intended two separate phrases to describe the way God's
righteousness was being revealed in the gospel, the most likely
explanation is that he intended it to be from the preacher's faith to
the hearers'.7 God's righteousness cannot be revealed in the gospel
unless a believer preaches it, and there is considerable reference to
preaching in the preceding verses. If that was Paul's intention, he
might not feel a need to spell it out. In the context of The Apostle's
claim, this is really another way of being emphatic about the
necessity and sufciency of faith. If he had intended to say that
God's righteousness is revealed in the gospel from God's faithfulness to human faith, as Barth suggests,8 that would be a major
additional point. We should expect that he would have made it
unambiguously and strongly, and that the idea of God's faithfulness would carry through to the e!k pistevq of the Habakkuk
quotation. There, however, the moy of the Septuagint version is
missing.
6
e.g. Kasemann, Commentary on Romans, 31.

Augustine, De Spiritu et Littera XI.18. The recipient is usually expressed with
the dative, but compare Rom. 8.18.
8
The Epistle to the Romans, 41.
7
122
The phrase is too emphatic for us to suppose that it was a cryptic

statement whose signicance would become clear later. The
preaching context does not allow for a major point to be made in a
submerged way, and to remain submerged as it is developed.
Accordingly, we have taken e!k pistevq ei! q pistin as an emphatic
way of underlining the fact that the revelation of God's righteousness in the gospel takes place in a sphere of faith, by one of the
mechanisms we have outlined. Given our knowledge of Paul's
language, listeners could take the phrase either way. In his own
context, one reading or the other may have been obvious. We are
happy with this conclusion, since we have identied the text as
preaching. When it is taken as theological exposition, this becomes
an explanation of last resort, `mere rhetorical stress'.
Rom. 1.17c: In the Habakkuk quotation, we have taken e!k
pistevq with o" dikaioq. In The Apostle's statement, o" dikaioq here
corresponds with those who receive salvation in Rom. 1.16, paq o"
pisteyvn. Thus, `the one who is righteous by faith will live'. This is
The Apostle's claim, and he presents the text as scripture support
for it.9 For The Congregation, the question of whether the phrase
should be taken with o" dikaioq or with zhsetai is not critical. In
the context of eschatological judgement, being righteous and living
are virtually different ways of referring to the same verdict.
It is sometimes argued that Rom. 1.1618 comprises a chain of
clauses linked by gar, going back to Rom. 1.15, and that the chain
should not be broken. Why, then, have we broken it when reading
the text as belonging to a speakinghearing context? At the beginning of the chain, the reasons for Paul's determination to preach in
Rome have been given in Rom. 1.1114 and taken up by the oy%tvq
of Rom. 1.15. In the chain that follows, attention is on the gospel
Paul preaches. Towards the end, the Habakkuk quotation provides
a minor conclusion, an aural and mental resting place. The gar of
Rom. 1.18 begins the process of showing how God's righteousness
is revealed in God's apparently questionable action.
Rom. 1.184.25 overview
With the challenging claim of Rom. 1.1617, The Apostle has
awakened The Conservative's sense of his identity as part of Israel,
9
Leenhardt (The Epistle to the Romans, 58) objects that this would require o" de
e!k pistevq dikaioq, but this is a quotation, not a freely formulated sentence.
123
and his difculty in seeing how the God of Israel could save people
simply on the basis of their believing the gospel, without reference
to membership in Israel.
In making good his claim, he will have to deal with attitudes
springing from The Conservative's self-understanding, and we shall
be helped to see how he is doing this if we sketch out that selfunderstanding. The Conservative as narratee in the text is a at
character, not a whole person, and our sketch takes account only of
his role in the preaching in the letter. Since he is a Jew (by birth or
adoption), God is the point of reference for his identity. God is the
God Israel knows in history, who elected Israel and is faithful to
that election. Speak to him about God and you are talking to him
about himself.
At the core of his problem here is something that we can perceive
as a disjunction in his self-perception. To oversimplify, he sees
himself before God as privileged, chosen, loved, a recipient of
grace, and is in no doubt that that gracious action includes dealing
with his sin, but over against Gentiles he sees himself as a member
of God's holy and righteous people, who are separated from and
favoured above the rest of the world, the Gentiles, e!j e!unvn
a"martvloi (Gal. 2.15).10 A clear example of this holding together
of different self-images is offered by a comparison of the Hodayoth
and the War Scroll from Qumran. While this is illogical, we
recognize it as very human. The Conservative's expectation of the
eschatological judgement is born of Israel's experience of oppression and suffering. God the righteous judge will vindicate God's
righteous and oppressed people and punish their enemies.11
The root of his problem is not that Jews are good and Gentiles
are bad, but that Jews are special to God and Gentiles are not.
With this goes a view, perhaps not even conscious, that Jewish sin
is different from Gentile sin, mere peccadilloes over against the
blackness of a culture characterized by idolatry and sexual mores
he nds abhorrent.
The thing in his new faith that threatens this image of God,
people and judgement is not that he has accepted Christ as a
sacrice for his sins, but that the same sacrice is being accepted by
Gentiles for theirs and is bringing them into the church. If it
brought them into Israel, he would have no problem. Christ
10
11
See Wisdom of Solomon, e.g. chs. 519, Jub. 22.1123.

Daniel 7 is an early example.
124
crucied could be seen as the fullment of God's earlier means of

dealing with sin within the covenant. The insistence that God's
action in Christ is the same for Jew and Gentile as Jew and Gentile
seems to wipe out Israel's distinctiveness, and with it Israel's
election. This is what he cannot reconcile with his understanding of
God's righteousness as including faithfulness to Israel. One thing
The Apostle does is to bring The Conservative's recognition that he
is a sinner to bear on his attitude that he is superior to, and rightly
privileged above, Gentile sinners.
In dealing with the web of beliefs and presuppositions that shape
The Conservative's identity and attitudes, The Apostle is not
dealing with axioms identied as starting points for theological
thinking. Rather, he is dealing with lifelong habits of mind and
behaviour. The Conservative might not even be fully conscious of
them. The Apostle has only words to use, but he needs to make
them operate at the levels of mind, experience and attitude if he is
to enable The Conservative to see his relationships to God and to
Gentiles in a new light because of the Cross. This new thing he is
offering is hard, but it is part of the obedience the gospel requires,
and he is presenting it as good news.
We have noticed that The Conservative found the problem with
The Apostle's preaching at the point where God justies Jew and
Gentile alike on the basis of faith, that is, when the JewGentile
distinction is over-ridden at the point of salvation. The Apostle's
approach includes leading The Conservative to see the distinction
over-ridden at the point of sin. Then God is dealing with sinful
Israel, not with righteous and oppressed Israel. That is no new
problem, as the prophets made clear.
We can now outline The Apostle's approach, remembering that
his task is to establish for The Conservative that God's righteousness is the saving power of the gospel that treats Jew and
Gentile alike. That involves helping The Conservative to come to
terms with important changes in his own idea of who he is as part
of Israel. This means that The Apostle's theocentric discourse has a
visible anthropocentric epicentre, but different from the one that
liberated Luther.
In Rom. 1.183.20, The Apostle begins at the point of agreement
about God's righteousness, the righteousness of God's wrath
towards sinners. Thus he awakens The Conservative's judgemental
attitude to `Gentile sinners'. Then he leads on to the point where
The Conservative has to see that his own axiom that God's
125
judgement is just and impartial means that he as sinner deserves the

same judgement (Rom. 2.111). The Apostle knows (from Paul's
experience) that The Conservative will respond by grasping at
Israel's special status: but what about the Torah? The nomoq, with
its vital element the law of Moses, is the instrument of Israel's
difference and the powerful symbol of God's election. Rom.
2.123.20 deals with this question. The Conservative is led to the
point where he sees that the law does not make Israel different at
the judgement, but places Jew with Gentile before God's judgement
as sinner.
At this point it appears that Israel's sin has obliterated the Jew
Gentile distinction as far as judgement is concerned, and also that
jioq
the only verdict the impartial judge can pass on anyone is A
uanatoy (Rom. 1.32a). What has become of the claim that God's
righteousness is saving power and that it includes the election of
Israel, that is, includes God's righteousness as faithfulness to the
covenant?
The Apostle shows that in the new gospel revelation, God's
righteousness as impartial judge and saviour fulls God's faithfulness to Israel in a way that breaks the bounds of Israel (Rom.
3.216). This leads on to an examination of Israel's election,
showing that God's purpose in election is fullled in the gospel
(Rom. 3.274.25).
It is worth noting here that in the teleological reading the
traditional exegetical contrast between the revelations of God's
wrath and God's righteousness disappears. The Conservative's
question is about God's righteousness as eschatological judge, and
he assumes that that includes righteous wrath, the proper judgement of condemnation on the sinner. The Apostle is talking all the
way through about God's righteousness. There is a contrast. It is
between the contradiction inherent in The Conservative's old way
of understanding God's righteousness and the resolution of that
contradiction by God's action in Christ. We shall see this working
out as The Apostle's preaching unfolds.
In chapter 6, we examined this passage to see whether it contributes
to a demonstration that all have sinned. We concluded that there is
no attempt to prove that anybody has sinned. Sin is a datum and
the passage is about God's just judgement of wrath. This conclu-
126
sion coheres with our reading of Rom. 1.1617. Having elicited the
question about God's righteousness, specically God's righteousness as eschatological judge, The Apostle now takes up the issue of
the righteousness of God's judgement. He begins at a point where
everybody involved can agree. Using gar and a construction
parallel with Rom. 1.17a, he takes up the claim he has already
made, and begins his demonstration by presenting a picture of
God's righteousness active in the condemnation of sin, as The
Congregation believes it will be at the judgement. The core of what
calls forth God's wrath is suppressing the truth (Rom. 1.18b). The
Apostle does not say who does this, but characterizes it as the
central sin. These people suppress the truth by rejecting the knowledge of himself that God has given them, and they are without
excuse because God has made himself known. To refuse the knowledge of God is to refuse to give God glory and thanks (Rom.
1.1921a). This refusal damages their own being, as their minds
and hearts are darkened and they are made foolish, not wise as they
think (Rom. 1.21b22). God's rst punishment is given with their
sin. Their foolishness is expressed in the exchange of God's glory
for idolatry (Rom. 1.223). The Apostle, The Congregation and
The Conservative do not suppose that one may simply refuse God
thanks and glory. The turning to worship of the mortal and created
is an exchange, not a subsequent free choice.
God's judgement of wrath takes the form of giving them up to
what they have made of themselves. The Apostle presents an
appalling picture of widening circles of sin. The rhetoric is built
around the repeated paredvken ay!toyq o" ueoq (Rom. 1.24, 26, 28),
and given its driving force by the interlocking of the individual
vignettes through repetition ([met]hllajan, e!n [e"]aytoiq, e!dokimasan a!dokimon noyn) and the binding effect of the cause and
effect sequence. The justice of God's judgement, grounded in
a!napologhtoyq (Rom. 1.20b), is reinforced by the way the punishment ts the crime. The picture comes to its climax in the ultimate
perversion, not only doing evil but doing it in aunting deance of
God's known ordinance, and approving those who do it. They do
wrong and see wrong done, and they call it right (Rom. 1.32). The
sin of the ungodly and wicked is their punishment for giving to
idols the glory and thanks due to God, but it is also their
responsible action which brings upon them the nal judgement,
jioi uanatoy (Rom. 1.32a). God's wrath is an activity of God's
A
righteous judgement. Those punished are without excuse.
127
This picture is familiar to The Conservative. It is expressed in the

language of Hellenistic Judaism's apologetic for its monotheistic
faith and its attack on Gentile idolatry. It encourages him to
respond, as he has always done, to a picture of God's wrath
towards the Gentiles, towards `them', not towards ùs', the Jews.
The Apostle has made The Conservative feel the security of his
own presuppositions. Yet under the surface there is another
current, if he is attuned to hear, or perhaps feel, it. The people on
whom this judgement is pronounced are human beings, not Gentiles, and their identity is left vague. Idolatry appears as the root of
all the other consequences of the suppression of the truth. Post-OT
Judaism characteristically saw this as other people's sin,12 but
Rom. 1.23 describes the fall into idolatry in terms reminiscent of
Israel's great sin of idolatry at Sinai.13 At the same time, it seems to
echo the story of the Fall, in which at least some Jews saw
themselves involved,14 and the language of Rom. 1.21b22 echoes
the LXX versions of Ps. 94 (LXX 93).11 and 2 Kgs. 17.15. The
catalogue of sins in Rom. 1.301 is an example of the vice lists used
in Jewish and church paraenesis. All this is part of The Conservative's background.
Our teleological reading of this passage is controlled by conclusions
about addressees and content. It is addressed to The Congregation,
which has just been forced to ask questions about God's righteousness, with an eye to The Conservative, who is faced with a
more specic question. It is about God's righteousness as judge
who condemns sinners.
The Apostle's preaching is operating at two main levels. First,
there is the level of argument. God is indeed righteous as eschatological judge who condemns people who sin by refusing God glory
and thanks. Condemnation for the things they do when they act
against their obligation to God is just (Rom. 1.1921, 32). They are
without excuse; they deserve death.
Reading this argument, we are struck by an apparent non
sequitur. Rom. 1.1920 appears to be modelled on the Hellenistic
12
Wisd. 15; b Sabb 146a; b Yebam 103b; b Abod Zar 22b.

Echoes of Ps. 106 (LXX 105).20; Jer. 2.11.
14
See, later, 2 Baruch 54.19b; 4 Ezra 3.216; 7.48[118], and compare Rom.
5.1214; 1 Cor. 15.212.
13
128
Jewish natural theology argument that God made himself known in

creation and people who do not acknowledge God are guilty
because they have not drawn the conclusion from the evidence.15
When this is read with Rom. 1.21a, we nd The Apostle arguing
that God gave the revelation, and they knew, but they did not act
on the knowledge. In causal exegesis we want to make sense of this
argument as springing from a system of thought that we can accept
as rational and credible, so we shall need to ask how Paul could
have made it. In teleological reading, we need to highlight the claim
and the logical gap. Clearly, The Apostle expects this line of
argument to be acceptable to The Congregation and, since The
Congregation is the implied audience, it is. In the causal exposition,
we shall need to ask how Paul could make this assumption in
addressing the Romans.
The second level at which the preaching is operating is that of
suggestion and reminiscence that takes the overt argument down to
The Conservative's presuppositions and feelings. This is achieved
by the familiar language.
Having elicited The Conservative's condemnation of `them', the
Gentiles, who are without excuse before the judgement (Rom.
1.20b) and worthy of death (Rom. 1.32), The Apostle begins
speaking directly to him. He turns from what The Conservative
thought was the climax of his picturing of God's righteous wrath
with another dio: Dio a!napologhtoq ei(, v( anurvpe paq o" krinvn
(Rom. 2.1a). This further conclusion is a shock to The Conservative, but The Apostle goes on to demonstrate it. Just like the
Gentiles, The Conservative is without excuse (Rom. 2.1; cf. 1.20).
In condemning others, he condemns himself because he does the
same things. The Apostle and The Conservative know that God's
judgement on those who do such things is according to truth, just
and impartial.
The Apostle continues remorselessly bringing out the effect of
The Conservative's actual sin on his expectation that Israel will be
justied when God judges impartially according to works. If The
Conservative expects to do the things he condemns in Gentiles and
escape God's condemnation, he is abusing God's patience and
15
e.g. Wisd. 13.19; Sib. Or. III.845.
129
kindness, which are intended to lead to repentance, not to more sin.

He is storing up for himself wrath on the day of judgement.
Picturing that judgement, The Apostle expounds the tradition that
God will give to each according to his works (Rom. 2.6; cf. Ps.
62.12 (LXX 61.13); Prov. 24.12; Sir. 16.14). Works are specied as
good or evil, and are seen as resulting from the orientation of a
person's life, either towards God's kingdom or in rebellion against
God. The chiastic presentation stresses the correspondence of
reward and punishment with works, and makes room for the
repeated ! Ioydaioq te prvton kai % Ellhn (Rom. 2.9, 10), echoing
Rom. 1.16. The Jew is rst in punishment and in reward. This takes
up the prophetic stress on Israel's responsibility as God's people
(for example Amos 1.33.2). Rom. 2.11 is The Apostle's climax. It
says to The Conservative, You believe that God is righteous and
judges impartially according to works. According to your own
belief, then, you stand before that judgement on the same terms as
the Gentiles whom you judge. This cuts across The Conservative's
presuppositions and not just in theory. His judgement on the
Gentiles has shown him up as one whose works deserve wrath and
fury, tribulation and distress (Rom. 2.89).
Our reading is controlled by the conclusion that The Apostle is
addressing The Conservative. We notice his Socratic method. He
does not tell The Conservative directly that he is doing what he
thought The Apostle was doing in Rom. 1.1617, holding together
contradictory ideas. Rather he leads him through his own feelings
and beliefs to a point where he runs up against something that
starts to make him encounter his own contradiction.
It is very noticeable that The Apostle's point here turns on the
statement that The Conservative does ta ay!ta (Rom. 2.1), yet he
makes no attempt to establish this. If we were treating the text as
theological exposition, we should ask how Paul could make this
claim. For the teleological reading, we ask how Paul expected the
charge to work. If The Conservative will retort that indeed he is not
guilty of idolatry, sexual immorality and rejecting God, The
Apostle's point will fail. If this were the case, Paul's point with the
Romans would fail. Paul was an experienced preacher and pastor,
and this letter was very important to him. Clearly, he expected that
his words would carry conviction. Why? The Conservative believes
130
that he will be saved at God's eschatological judgement not because

of what he has done and refrained from doing but because Christ
died for his sins. He does not need proof that he has offended
against God. A person with as strong a sense of the righteousness
of his community over against the rest of the world as a member of
the Qumran community could still write,
As for me, shaking and trembling seize me
and all my bones are broken;
my heart dissolves like wax before re
and my knees are like water
pouring down a steep place.
For I remember my sins
and the unfaithfulness of my fathers.
When the wicked rose against Thy Covenant
and the damned against thy word,
I said in my sinfulness,
Ì am forsaken by Thy Covenant.'
(1QH IV, 335)
Further, although the cap paq o" krinvn ts and he wears it, it also
ts the community in which he formed his understanding of Israel
and of God. Rom. 1.1832 has brought that out by eliciting the
judging response.
The Conservative has always been comfortably familiar with the
idea that there is no partiality with God (Rom. 2.11). The inference
that Jew and Gentile will therefore be rewarded and punished
equally and he will deserve punishment is simply shocking.16 His
response will be, But what about the Torah? Israel is marked off
from the world around by God's gift of the Torah, the symbol of
election. All his life The Conservative has experienced Israel's
specialness in observing the Mosaic law. Surely all this makes a
difference. Surely there is something amiss with the way The
Apostle has been leading him.
The Apostle knew that this would be the question, and had
planned it. Now he deals with it at length. His opening is virtually a
summary statement of his response to The Conservative's objec16
Sanders observes that the rabbinic literature asks questions within the connes
of Israel's obedience. There is no systematic, or even consistent, treatment of
Gentiles (Palestinian Judaism, 21112).
131
tion: o%soi gar a!nomvq h%marton, a!nomvq kai a!poloyntai, kai o%soi
e!n nomCv h%marton, dia nomoy kriuhsontai (Rom. 2.12). For
sinners, having the Torah makes a difference to the measure by
which they will be condemned. It does not alter the fact that they
will be condemned. Those who do the law will be justied, not
those who hear it (Rom. 2.13 cf. Acts 15.21). He spells out for The
Conservative what this will mean for Gentile and Jew.
He reminds The Conservative of the many times he has seen
Gentiles doing things the law requires even though they do not
have the law (Rom. 2.14). Their actions show that what the law
requires is written on their hearts, so that their consciences and
their thoughts will be witnesses at God's judgement (Rom.
2.1516). The judgement will be through Christ, whom The
Conservative has accepted as a sacrice for his sin, and God will
judge ta krypta tvn a!nurvpvn (Rom. 2.16). These things The
Conservative cannot see. God sees truly, and God's impartial
judgement is just. Even though the verdicts are being determined by
what people are doing now (Rom. 2.5), The Conservative cannot
be so sure that he knows what they will be. The fact that Gentiles
do not have the law does not put them at a disadvantage before
God's judgement.
Now The Apostle turns to The Conservative's attitude to Israel's
possession of the Torah. He has always seen this as making Israel
special and privileged over against the Gentiles. The Apostle builds
up a picture of The Conservative's self-perception. Simply because
he is a Jew, he rests in the law and boasts in God. Knowing God's
will, he can make right practical and moral judgements on the basis
of the law, and so be leader, light, teacher to the benighted Gentiles
(Rom. 2.1720). At one level, this is a proper perception of Israel
as God's elect, with her being determined by God and with the gift
of wisdom to offer to the Gentile world. At another level, however,
it is marred by the attitude to Gentiles. It matches the perception of
the Gentile world that The Apostle evoked in Rom. 1.1832, but is
hardly compatible with The Conservative's perception of Gentiles
he knows in real life (Rom. 2.1416), or with his own acceptance of
Christ's death for his sins. Here is a superior condescending to the
benighted, not a recipient of grace who wishes to share the gift.
Now The Apostle breaks off his sentence, and begins to drive home
the contradiction between The Conservative's idea of what the
Torah has made of him and the real-life effects of possessing it. His
actual sin contradicts what he thinks God's election has made him.
132
The very fact that he boasts in the law causes his transgression to
dishonour God (Rom. 2.213). The Apostle crowns his accusation
with a text of scripture turned against The Conservative: to onoma
toy ueoy di' y"maq blasfhmeitai e!n toiq eunesin (Rom. 2.24). The
prophets said this of dispossessed Israel (Isa. 52.5; Ezek. 36.20), but
now it is unmistakably Israel's fault. The Conservative is most
radically condemned dia nomoy (Rom. 2.12b).
But The Conservative has another defence. What about circumcision? God made the covenant with Israel, and is righteous as
faithful to the covenant. `No Israelite who is circumcised will go
down to Gehinnom' (Ex Rab XIX.4). Again, The Apostle turns
The Conservative's expectations upside down. He examines the
principle of circumcision, showing the logical conclusion of insisting on God's impartial judgement. He states the principle.
Circumcision counts if you do the law (Rom. 2.25a). In Rom. 2.25b
he claims that the principle works in reverse. If you are a
transgressor of the law, your circumcision becomes uncircumcision.
He goes on remorselessly. That would work in reverse, too, would
it not? If an uncircumcised person kept the law, his uncircumcision
would be reckoned as circumcision (Rom. 2.26). In Rom. 2.27 he
uses a logical future to state the startling result of this chain of
logic. The law-keeping Gentile will be righteous and will judge the
Jew who transgresses the law. In the light of Israel's sin and God's
righteousness as judge, circumcision and the identity of the true
Jew must be reassessed. The Apostle does this with a double
contrast (Rom. 2.289). The true Jew is not one e!n tCv fanerCv, but
one e!n tCv kryptCv. True circumcision is not e!n tCv fanerCv, e!n
sarki, or grammati. It is peritomh kardiaq e!n pneymati. The
Conservative should know this, since circumcision in the esh is
contrasted with circumcision of the heart in his tradition.17 True
circumcision is a matter of spirit, not of esh. True circumcision
and the true Jew are those recognized by God, who sees truly the
things that are hidden from human observation (Rom. 2.16, 29). By
now, The Conservative's image of God's holy and righteous people
contrasted with the wicked Gentile world has gone, crushed by the
recognition of the impartiality of the righteous judge and the
practical realities visible to one whose own sin has been dealt with
by the God of the gospel. The dividing line between God's people
17
Deut. 10.16; 30.6; Jer. 4.4; cf. Jer. 9.245; Lev. 26.41; Jub. 1.23; Philo, Mig. 92;
Spec. Leg. I, 3045.
133
and not God's people is hidden in God's secret knowledge, and it

seems unlikely that it will correspond with the division between
Israel and not Israel.
Again, the teleological reading is governed by the nature of the
text. We notice particularly how our identication of the text as
preaching and as directed rst of all to The Conservative frees us
from tensions generated by treating it as theological exposition.
In Rom. 2.1416 there is a time shift, however krinei is accented.
Rom. 2.15 deals in the present with Gentile thoughts and consciences, but in Rom. 2.16, in the same sentence, these are active at
the judgement, which is expected in the future. In our teleological
reading, we recognize this uidity. The close relationship between
acts here and now and the outcome of the coming judgement
allows The Apostle and The Conservative to blur present and
future in their speech. The same blurring appears in Rom. 2.13 and
Rom. 2.289, although it is not so noticeable because they are
statements of principle. This is consistent with Paul's eschatology.
In the Cross, the eschatological judgement has been brought
forward into the present, yet it is still to be completed at the day of
judgement. Romans belongs to this nal time, with its sense of the
imminence of the End (Rom. 13.1114).
A second feature that is troublesome when we read the text as
theological exposition is the presence of Gentiles who do the law
(Rom. 2.14, 267), particularly since they are said to do it even
though they do not obey the command to circumcise. Logically,
circumcision is one of the commandments of the law and therefore
Gentiles who by denition are uncircumcised cannot be said to
keep the law. This text tells us that we are dealing with a discussion
in which circumcision was thought of, at least sometimes, as
separate from Torah observance. The same separation appears in
Rom. 4.912 and is presupposed by Paul's insistence to the
Galatians that anybody who accepts circumcision is bound to keep
the whole law (Gal. 5.3). Circumcision and law-keeping are being
considered as two marks of a Jew. We accept this as a feature of the
text that we must respect.
In Rom. 2.1416, The Apostle is not making a formal theological
argument. Rather, he is directing The Conservative to the way his
experience questions some of his ideas. Among the Gentiles he
134
knows are some who, by the standards of judgement outlined in

Rom. 2.710, must have as good a chance as he and other Jews he
knows will have. As long as we think in terms of theological
exposition, we shall not be free to recognize the character of the
text, which is directed very personally to The Conservative, his
experience and his attitudes. We note the inconsistency between a
blanket condemnation of Gentiles as a response to Rom. 1.1832
and the recognition of the good qualities of some known Gentile
families. Even though it is illogical, it is common human experience
to nd oneself condemning a category of people and excepting
known individuals.
fysei, Rom. 2.14: Agreeing with Dunn's grammatical arguments,18 we have taken fysei with poivsin. The sentence is
ambiguous, however. If o" a!naginvskvn took it with mh . . . exonta,
the same main point would be made. At the level of the teleological
reading, the difference is not critical.
Rom. 2.1724: The thrust of this passage is that God is dishonoured because Israel sins while boasting in the law. This point is
made by the contrast between Jewish self-perception over against
the Gentiles and Gentile perception of Jews who sin. It is crowned
by the scripture quotation placed in the emphatic nal position.
The anacoluthon has a dramatic rhetorical function.
If The Conservative can reject the charges implied in the questions of Rom. 2.212, The Apostle's argument will have lost its
persuasive force, yet the charges seem extravagant. How is this
rhetoric intended to work? The central charge appears in Rom.
2.23, and there is no problem about it. Inconsistency does not have
to express itself in dramatic ways to call forth harsh criticism,
especially of those who set themselves up as leaders and teachers.
Has it been over-illustrated? The Apostle (and therefore Paul's
discussion) proceeds on the assumption that the charges will carry
conviction. Since it is unreasonable to believe that all, or even a
considerable proportion, of the Jews were guilty of the crimes
enumerated, we must ask how this could be so.
This kind of rhetoric is part of the way such discussion was
carried on at the time. Stowers claims that Rom. 2.1724 could
stand in for the characterization of the pretentious philosopher in
some Hellenistic literature,19 and the epistle of Heraclitus to
18
19
Romans, 98.
The Diatribe and Paul's Letter to the Romans, 11213.
135
Hermodorus describes the Ephesians in a way that cannot have

applied to all of them: `Give me an occasion for laughing in a time
of peace when you do not wage war in court by using your tongues
as weapons, and that after you have committed fraud, seduced
women, poisoned friends, robbed temples, prostituted, been found
breaking oaths, beaten your ritual drums, each one lled with a
different evil.'20 A good NT example of denunciation of a class of
people whose actions were seen as belying their words is Matt.
23.136. Again, the charges cannot have applied to all.
The charges in Rom. 2.212 illustrate breaking God's commandments in ways that were particularly likely to cause Gentile
blaspheming (Rom. 2.234), as Watson's citing of notorious individual cases shows.21 All the items are paralleled in a list of
crimes given by Philo: `so that when he attempts to commit theft or
adultery, murder or sacrilege or any similar deed, he should not
nd an easy path'.22
The services for Yom Kippur still include confession of such
offences as robbery, violence, blasphemy, unchastity.23 Gaster
makes sense of this for modern American Jews by pointing out that
the confessions are in the rst person plural and concern purication of the whole House of Israel.24
Nomoq: In Romans, nomoq rst appears in Rom. 2.12, and from
then on it presents problems of understanding and translation. The
term refers to the Torah, which includes the law of Moses. In the
situation in which this letter was written, it was often represented
by that law. This is because of its function in forming Jewish
identity both within Israel and over against the rest of the world. Its
sociological function as a boundary marker was a major factor in
the problems faced by the young church.
In Rom. 2.1229, the Torah appears largely as something that
has to be done, that is, as the law of Moses, and as such it is the
criterion of judgement. In Rom. 2.1720, the statements are about
the whole of the Torah, God's revelation. But again, the emphasis
is on the Torah as The Conservative thinks of it in this context,
primarily as the law. On the other hand, the real agenda here is The
20
Malherbe, The Cynic Epistles, p. 203, no. 4.

Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles, 11315. See also Schenk's discussion of temple
robbery: ì" eroq ktl', TDNT, III, 2556.
22
Conf. 163.
23
The Authorized Daily Prayer Book of the United Hebrew Congregations of the
British Commonwealth of Nations, 3534.
24
Festivals of the Jewish Year, 137.
21
136
Conservative's habit of seeing Israel as privileged by God's election.

The main role of the nomoq in Rom. 1.164.25 is as symbol of
God's election of Israel.
God's righteousness: The Apostle's concern in Rom. 1.164.25 is
with the question of God's righteousness. The Conservative's
perception of that needs to change. We note a shifting of focus
through the discussion from Rom. 1.18 to Rom. 2.29. The Apostle
begins by speaking directly about the righteousness of God's
judgement. By the end, the focus has shifted onto The Conservative's perception of God's righteousness as judge of Jew and
Gentile. The Conservative has been led to a point where he has to
recognize that God's righteousness as impartial judge does not
allow for a privileged place for Jews.
By Rom. 2.29, it seems that God's righteousness as impartial judge
leaves no room for Israel's election. What, then, has become of
God's righteousness as faithful covenant partner with Israel? It
seems that God can be righteous in one way or the other, but not in
both. The Apostle and The Conservative have come to a point
where it seems that Israel's sin makes it impossible for God to be
righteous. There must be something wrong somewhere. The
Apostle shows The Conservative that something is wrong with his
presuppositions.
He leads The Conservative very carefully and very dramatically
through this discussion, using questions and answers in the diatribe
style of a teacher who wants to make sure that the learner will
grasp a difcult point. In this case, the point is difcult because The
Apostle is driving The Conservative hard into the dilemma created
by his own presuppositions. He raises the question The Conservative will want to ask, and then uses more questions to make The
Conservative think carefully about what lies behind the question in
his own mind and in the debates he has been hearing.
Paul was able to use this technique because of the oral character
of even a written letter. " O a!naginvskvn would prepare the reading,
and present it much more dramatically than modern liturgical
readers usually do. The opportunities and constraints of our printliterate milieu would oblige one of us to use different techniques to
present such an argument. The concrete context of the teleological
reading helps us to identify whose question each one is, whilst we
137
remember that this is not a real dialogue. The Apostle uses the
technique to take The Conservative's doubts and problems seriously, but he asks and answers all the questions. There is no
chance for The Conservative to contribute something that will
undermine his intention.
Rom. 3.1: The Apostle voices The Conservative's question, ti
oy(n to perisson toy ! Ioydaioy h$ tiq h" v!feleia thq peritomhq;
What is left of Israel's election?
Rom. 3.2: The Apostle gives his own reply: poly kata panta
tropon. prvton men gar o%ti e!pisteyuhsan ta logia toy ueoy.
He insists that God's faithfulness to Israel is not set aside. Israel's
rst advantage is having been entrusted with God's logia. This
shifts the focus from the Sinai covenant, characterized for The
Conservative by the Mosaic law, to all God's address to Israel,
including law, promise and prophecy. These commit God to Israel,
and place obligation on Israel (e!pisteyuhsan). The Conservative
has not been considering that.
Rom. 3.3: To make explicit the real issue, The Apostle asks a
question of his own, one that goes to the root of The Conservative's
problem about God's faithfulness (Rom. 3.3a): ti gar; ei!
h!pisthsan tineq . . .;
Israel's unfaithfulness has raised the problem. Now it can be
properly formulated (Rom. 3.3b): mh h" a!pistia ay!tvn thn pistin
toy ueoy katarghsei;
Rom. 3.4: The Apostle gives the only answer possible for The
Conservative: mh genoito. In ordinary covenants, a betrayed
partner might consider himself released from his obligations, but
the chosen people know from experience that God's faithfulness is
not bound to Israel's. Still speaking as the voice of The Conservative, The Apostle offers scripture support for mh genoito, spelling
out the experience of history: ginesuv de o" ueoq a!lhuhq, paq de
anurvpoq ceysthq, kauvq gegraptai.
o%pvq a$n dikaivuBhq e!n toiq logoiq soy
kai nikhseiq e!n tCv krinesuai se.
Even if the situation were worse than suggested and everyone in
Israel were false, God would still be true. The quotation from Ps.
51.4 (LXX 50.6), which The Conservative certainly afrms, shows
the dilemma that results from wanting to make God's righteousness
as faithful covenant partner exclude God's righteousness as judge
who condemns the guilty when Israel is guilty. The sin of the sinner
138
actually shows God's righteousness. The sentence of condemnation

is the righteous response to the falsity of the covenant partner.
Because of Israel's sin God will be acknowledged as righteous in
the law-suit with Israel, righteous precisely as the judge who passes
the proper sentence of condemnation.
Rom. 3.5: By forcing this answer, The Apostle has opened the way
for a still sharper challenge. The next question is his own: ei! de h"
a!dikia h"mvn ueoy dikaiosynhn synisthsin, ti e!roymen; mh adikoq
o" ueoq o" e!pifervn thn o!rghn;
He qualies this question by saying that it is a merely human one; it
really voices an opposition question: kata anurvpon legv.
If God gains from Israel's sin, is it fair to punish the sinner? The
Conservative might not want to put it like that, but that is the only
logical ground on which sinful Israel could still want God to save
Israel and be just at the same time. This logic is a travesty of God's
righteousness and of Israel's experience.
Rom. 3.6: Speaking as The Conservative, The Apostle supplies the
only answer possible for him: mh genoito.
He justies this with another shared axiom: e!pei pvq krinei o" ueoq
ton kosmon;
The judge of all the world is just, and God's justice includes visiting
wrath on sinners.
Rom. 3.78: The Apostle goes on to work out this false logic as far
as it will go, in a caustic reductio ad absurdum which is not so
absurd, after all, since it runs into a real charge brought against Paul:
ei! de h" a!lhueia toy ueoy e!n tCv e!mCv ceysmati e!perisseysen ei! q
thn dojan ay!toy, ti eti ka!gv v"q a"martvloq krinomai; (Rom. 3.7).
But if you object to being judged on the ground that your sin has
enhanced God's glory, the next step is only a positive formulation
of the same principle: kai mh kauvq blasfhmoymeua kai kauvq
fasin tineq h"maq legein o%ti poihsvmen ta kaka, i% na eluBh ta
a!gaua; (Rom. 3.8). Ànd should we (as we are slandered and as
some say that we say) do evil that good may come?' The Apostle
goes past the negative answer he has invited, condemning the tineq
who want to draw so patently false a conclusion from the Pauline
preaching.
The Apostle has forced The Conservative into a cleft stick. He
has given voice to The Conservative's objections to what has been
said so far, and shown that there must be something wrong with
them. They run into contradiction with axiomatic truths; they lead
to blasphemy. There must be something more to be said.
139

Basic to this teleological reading of Rom. 3.18 are our recognition
of the nature of the text The Apostle is in charge, Paul is
preaching with authority to lead a co-operative audience into new
truth and Stowers' work, showing clearly that the diatribal
question and answer constitute a positive teaching technique25
rather than a defensive tactic. The difculties some people had with
Paul's preaching are taken seriously, but Paul was not allowing the
questioners to set the terms of the discussion. He did that.
Contemporary literature provides examples of the technique The
Apostle is using here. The most useful are in Epictetus' Discourses,
because not all of them are fake dialogues like this one: II.24.110
is an example of his questioning of another person; II.9.27 an
example of the teacher giving both the questions and the answers.
In II.12.513 he describes Socrates' use of the technique. Its use
here continues The Apostle's basic approach of leading The
Conservative to recognize his own presuppositions and start to
question them.
With this reading, we have found that the unsatisfactory
outcome of the questioning is intentional, not something that has
to be condemned, excused or smoothed over. The Conservative will
need to nd a way of coming to terms with the dilemma into which
his presuppositions have led him. He will need this resolution for
his peace of mind and way of life, because he has to nd solid
ground to stand on once more.
logia, Rom. 3.2: We take the broad sense because the original
idea of oracles does not refer to any particular content, while the
context involves the covenant in some sense, with stress on responsibility rather than privilege. With this stress The Apostle was
taking up a hint in Rom. 2.810. Part of his correcting of the
question that was being discussed in the church was to balance
the privilege of election with the responsibility it entailed. The
Conservative's questionings suggest that the former had been much
more in evidence than the latter.
e!n tCv krinesuai se, Rom. 3.4: We have accepted Wilckens'
argument for the middle: the double formulation with e!n (where
with krinesuai as passive e!k or a!po would be expected) and the
parallelism between nikhseiq and krinesuai, which suggests par25
The Diatribe and Paul's Letter to the Romans, e.g. 767, 1824.
140
allel descriptions of God's role.26 Yet if half the Romans took it to

refer to God being put in the dock and the other half to refer to
God as judge, all of them would hear that God is justied in the
sight of Israel as the result of a legal process. The difference is not
critical for The Apostle's discourse.
Rom. 3.8: The fact that The Apostle has the initiative rules out
readings with one question running from Rom. 3.7, since there is
no reason for the change of subject. The piling up of separate
questions serves the rhetoric better. The reading adopted, taking mh
with poihsvmen, and treating o%ti as redundant but prompted by
legein, avoids reading the ti of Rom. 3.7b into Rom. 3.8, which
does not suit the sequence of separate questions.
The Conservative is having a hard time. The Apostle has convinced
him that Israel's sin means that God can be just as eschatological
judge or as Israel's saviour, but not both. He has then led him into
the afrmation that Israel's experience shows that God is both
faithful to the covenant and just judge of the world, and God's
faithfulness is not dependent on Israel's. The conversation is about
what this means for Israel at the judgement. The Apostle puts one
more of The Conservative's questions, and then answers it:
Question: You said we are no better off than the Gentiles
at the judgement. Now you say that God is faithful to the
covenant even when we are not. Are you saying after all
that we Jews are preferred (proexomeua)?
Reply: Not at all (oy! pantvq).
(Rom. 3.9a)
Divine faithfulness does not mean that Jews will receive preferential
treatment at God's just and impartial judgement. The Apostle goes
on to show The Conservative what it does mean.
He begins with the reason he gives for oy! pantvq. What has been
established in Rom. 3.18 does not overset what was being
recognized before it, that Jews and not just Gentiles are under sin.
The charge of being under sin does not admit of degrees of guilt.
One either is or is not in bondage. That has wiped out the difference
that The Conservative hoped that having the law would make. The
Apostle repeats the catch-phrase ! Ioydaioq te kai % Ellhn, this time
26
Der Brief an die Romer, I, p. 165 and n. 439.
141
without prvton, emphasizing the exact equality (Rom. 3.9b).27

Then he presents a battery of scripture texts to support the charge.
The wording of the charge is about exact equality, and the texts
seem to apply to everybody. A listener-in might hear all this as
being about everybody, but The Conservative is not a listener-in.
He hears in the èverybody', as The Apostle intends, a further
repudiation of the idea that Jews might be an exception. He does
not need to be convinced about `Gentile sinners', but he does need
to be convinced about Israel. The Apostle makes his point explicit
when he says that the law speaks to those within its domain, so that
every mouth (Jew as well as Gentile) may be stopped and the whole
world (Jew as well as Gentile) be answerable to God the judge
(Rom. 3.19). The Conservative thought that having the law was
going to mean that at God's righteous judgement righteous Israel
would be justied (cf. Rom. 3.20a), but Israel's sin means that what
the law does bring is knowledge of sin (Rom. 3.20b), as The
Apostle's quotations have just demonstrated.
The Apostle has led The Conservative to confront the contradictions in presuppositions he has never before articulated and
scrutinized. He has been afraid that an eschatological judge who
justied believing sinners without distinguishing between Jew and
Gentile must be unfaithful to the covenant with Israel. The Apostle
has shown him that by his own criteria, the righteous eschatological
judge is impartial and must treat Jew and Gentile alike. His
objections really depended on the assumption that Israel would
come to judgement as God's righteous and oppressed people. The
Apostle has pushed the problem back to Israel's sin. On The
Conservative's presuppositions, God could be righteous as eschatological judge only if Israel deserved the verdict Dikaioq, and the
law, the instrument of election, has shown that this is not the case.
The eschatological judge seems to be in a dilemma. Either his
righteousness as impartial judge must cancel out his saving righteousness, with its connection with righteousness as faithfulness to
Israel, or else he must do the unthinkable (Rom. 3.56) and save at
the expense of impartial justice. It seems that human sin can nullify
God's righteousness. The Apostle has claimed that in the gospel the
righteousness of the judge is saving power for Jew and Gentile, and
includes faithfulness to elect Israel (Rom. 1.1617).
27
The reading of A is best explained as an insertion on the model of Rom. 1.16;
2.9, 10.
142

Rom. 3.9a: This verse offers a real challenge to our principle of

preferring the most obvious reading of a difcult text. We must
work out rst what the text is, and then what is the most obvious
way of reading it.
Most editors and commentators accept the most difcult
reading, ti oyn proexomeua oy pantvq. Dahl, O'Neill28 and
Dunn29 accept the otherwise unattested reading of P, ti oyn
proexomeua. After a thorough review of the textual evidence, Dahl
concludes that `the textual history leaves room for the possibility'
that the P reading is older than the text usually accepted.30 Beyond
that, all three arguments rely on questions of meaning, and depend
on the context of the justication account. Not being convinced by
these arguments, we accept the difcult reading, which is well
attested. Accepting oy pantvq, we accept also the NestleAland
punctuation. A question with ti would not be answered with oy!
pantvq, and the position of gar is against separating pantvq from
oy!.
What is the most obvious way of reading this text? In correct
usage, oy! pantvq would have oy! negating pantvq, and this can be
taken to mean `not absolutely'. The phrase occurs in 1 Cor. 5.10.
Some commentators take the construction as correct and meaning
`not absolutely'.31 This would mean that the Corinthians were not
instructed to avoid evil-doers absolutely. In 1 Cor. 5.1012,
however, Paul is correcting their understanding of his earlier
instruction. This favours the interpretation that he did not mean
that they were to avoid the evil-doers of the world. Rather, they
must avoid evil-doers among the brothers. This requires `not at all',
as do Epictetus' Encheiridion 1.5 and Diognetus IX.1. In 1 Cor.
16.12, Paul used pantvq oy! for an emphatic negative, so his usage
is not simply irregular. Thus, oy! pantvq could be a qualied
negative, although we have no Pauline example, or an emphatic
correcting negative, for which we have a Pauline example. There
are two questions about proexomeua. Who are `we'? The context,
with The Apostle's address to The Conservative and the diatribe
28
29
30
31
59.
Paul's Letter to the Romans, 679.

Romans, 146.
`Romans 3.9: Text and Meaning', 184204, 192.
e.g. Craneld, Romans, I, 190; Vaughan, H PROS RVMAIOYS EPISTOLH,
143
form, identies `we' as The Apostle and The Conservative, believers

who think of themselves as Jews. Should we take the verb as
passive, middle or middle as active? The use of middle as active is
not otherwise attested for this verb. As Lagrange observes,
however, some of the text variants indicate that this was accepted
by readers much closer to Paul than we are,32 and our evidence is
limited. As a middle, it would mean `do we defend ourselves?'. This
is ruled out by the immediate context. It would have to refer to the
charge in Rom. 3.8, but this has already been swept aside. Further,
Rom. 3.9b is offering a basis for oy! pantvq, and the charge that all
are under sin is not a ground for saying that the `we' of Rom. 3.8
do not urge the doing of evil that good may come.33 There is no
philological objection to the passive, but the usage is scarcely
attested. It is hard to say that there is an obvious reading of Rom.
3.9a.
What, then, is The Apostle saying to The Conservative with ti
oy(n; proexomeua; oy! pantvq? Our interpretation takes the least
objectionable meaning of proexomeua, the passive. The meaning
usually offered for it is, Are we excelled? In the context of mainstream interpretation, this has to be made acceptable as, Are we
worse off ? `We' must then be `we Jews', and the Jews must be
worse off than the Gentiles, which is not impossible, but is difcult.
We accept the reading offered by Olshausen,34 Vaughan35 and
Liddon,36 Are we preferred? This is a perfectly intelligible passive
of a known Classical Greek use of the active. Text criticism on this
verse has been done in the context of the justication-account
reading. In that context, a reference to being preferred by God
seems strained, and is open to the objection that it involves an
unacceptable change in the subject of the verb. In The Apostle's
dialogue with The Conservative, however, the natural question at
this point is precisely one about God's preference. If The Apostle
says that God will not favour Jews (Rom. 2.129) but then insists
that God is faithful to the covenant even when Israel is not (Rom.
3.18), perhaps he will go on to say that God will give preference to
Jews after all. Certainly The Conservative is entitled to ask the
32
Romains, 689.
Guerra's argument that it can be so read (Romans and the Apologetic Tradition,
70) requires the Romans to be listening for corollaries, not following the text as it is
being read.
34
Der Brief des Apostels Paulus an die Romer, 128.
35
H PROS RVMAIOYS EPISTOLH, 59.
36
Explanatory Analysis of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, 64.
33
144
question, and The Apostle will want to make sure that it is asked
and answered, not left as a possible source of confusion. We expect
the answer, `Not at all', and for the reason The Apostle gives in
Rom. 3.9b. Thus, oy! pantvq is functioning here as a correcting
negative, as in 1 Cor. 5.10. It rejects a wrong understanding of
something that has been said and leads on to its replacement with a
right one. In the setting of a diatribal encounter between The
Apostle and The Conservative, there is no problem with a change
of subject. In the diatribe, `we' is the `we' of the conversation. In
this passage, the exception comes in Rom. 3.8, where the change of
reference is readily intelligible.
The Conservative's dilemma focusses on the law as symbol of
God's righteousness, God's constant electing grace and impartiality
as judge. Seeing this righteousness in the framework provided by
his previously unexplored understanding of the law, he has been led
to an impossible point: Israel's unrighteousness cancels the possibility of God being righteous and the possibility of anybody being
saved. That is not the truth of The Conservative's life in God. He
has known Israel's God as faithful saviour, and in Christ he knows
that Gentiles are being brought under God's mercy, too. His
problem is not with that fact, but with the terms on which it
happens.
The Apostle says, `But now God's righteousness has been made
manifest apart from the law, being witnessed to by the law and the
prophets' (Rom. 3.21). The reference to the gospel is obvious. What
The Apostle stresses is the relationship of the new revelation of
God's righteousness (nyni de) to the earlier one. It is apart from the
law, the marker of Israel's specialness and the instrument of a
judgement that no one deserves the verdict Dikaioq. At the same
time, the law and the prophets bear witness to it. That is, it is new
action of Israel's God, in continuity with his former action. The
Apostle is not preaching some new God. The God of the gospel has
not abandoned what he was doing with Israel but fullled it. This is
both reassurance and challenge for The Conservative.
In Rom. 3.22, The Apostle goes on showing the newness of the
new revelation. God's righteousness is now manifest and effective
through `Christ faith', faith in Jesus Christ. So far, The Conservative has no problem. That is the new truth he has found in the
145
gospel. Salvation is in Christ. `For everyone who has faith', The

Apostle continues. This picks up xvriq nomoy. He has returned to
his starting point, but this time `for all who believe' is not the root
of a dilemma, as it seemed in Rom. 1.1617, but a necessary part of
the solution contained in God's action. If it is through faith in
Christ, then it is for all who have such faith, Jew and Gentile. The
Apostle goes on to show how this resolves The Conservative's
dilemma: `For there is no distinction, for all have sinned and lack
the glory of God, being justied freely' (Rom. 3.22d24a). This is
the judgement and salvation that is the power of the gospel. The
Conservative has not wanted to accept that there is no distinction
in justication because he assumed that there was distinction in the
matters of sin and the glory of God. The gospel conrms the law's
judgement of condemnation, but adds to it the judgement of
justication. There is no distinction between Jew and Gentile as
sinners; there is no distinction between Jew and Gentile as receivers
of the verdict Dikaioq. God's righteousness is effective for all who
have faith, solely on the basis of their faith, that is, in this context,
without reference to their membership of Israel.
The Apostle goes on to remind The Conservative of what he
knows about how God the righteous and impartial judge gives to
sinners the verdict Dikaioq. It is by an act of grace (tBh ay!toy xariti
Rom. 3.24a), dia thq a!polytrvsevq thq e!n XristCv ! Ihsoy. o^n
proeueto o" ueoq i" lasthrion dia thq pistevq e!n tCv ay!toy ai% mati
(Rom. 3.24b25a). Something has been added to the righteousness
of the just judge, something that corresponds to the righteousness
of Israel's saviour. It has been added e!n XristCv ! Ihsoy, that is,
again, xvriq nomoy.
There is a!polytrvsiq in Christ by virtue of the fact that God set
him forth as a i" lasthrion. Here is the just judge condemning
sinners. Everyone who needs and accepts redemption that is in a
% jioq uanatoy.
i" lasthrion is receiving from the judge the verdict A
Yet in this very act of condemnation, the judge is dealing with the
sin of the sinner. Two aspects of sin appeared in The Apostle's
earlier discussion, sin's power over the sinner, and the sinner's
responsible action. Because they had known God and refused him
glory and thanks, God had given them up, so that they sinned more
and more, ultimately wilfully defying God (Rom. 1.1932). Jew has
no advantage over Gentile before God's judgement because all are
y"f ' a"martian (Rom. 3.9b). Through Christ's death, sinners are
being set free from the power of sin that was preventing them from
146
receiving the verdict Dikaioq. This redemption is in Christ Jesus,

whom God set forth as a i" lasthrion. We listeners-in cannot be
sure exactly what this term meant to The Apostle and The
Conservative, but it is clear that a i" lasthrion deals with the effects
of sinning, guilt and ever deeper bondage. The Apostle has not
hesitated to insist on the accountability of those who were given up
to sin. Because of their wilful disobedience, they are ajioi uanatoy
(Rom. 1.32a). Since the law condemns Jew along with Gentile, the
whole world is y"podikoq . . . tCv ueCv (Rom. 3.19b).
Thus, in the one act which is proclaimed in the gospel, God has
acted both as just judge and as saviour. The Conservative knows
already that his faith in Christ is faith in the one who died for his
sin, but he has not until now looked into his own expectation and
seen the judgement in the light of the Cross. He was expecting that
God would judge impartially according to works and recognize
righteous Israel. Instead, God has been doing what he did so often
for unrighteous Israel, bringing Israel back from sin. And now, in
the gospel of the Cross, God is doing that in a way that breaks the
bounds of Israel.
The Apostle's account of the How of God's saving action has
been brief because none of it needed explaining. It did need to be
put into its proper context for The Conservative with his old ideas.
The Apostle turns now to deal much more fully with the Why. He
spells out for The Conservative certain implications of the Cross.
Why did God do it in this way? Precisely, The Apostle explains
carefully, so that God may be seen to be righteous and may be
righteous. In setting forth Christ as a i" lasthrion God demonstrated righteousness in two respects. The rst is `because of the
passing over of former sins in the patience of God' (Rom.
3.25b26a). God revealed the righteous judgement of wrath against
sin rst by giving up the sinners. The result was that they sinned
more and more, in deance of God's known judgement that those
who do such things are worthy of death. There was still a
judgement to come, as The Conservative expected. `The passing
over of former sins' refers to the delaying of the nal judgement in
the patience of God. We can understand what this would say to
The Conservative by looking at Rom. 1.242.11. He would not
need to be reminded. In the Cross, the nal judgement has come
down on the sins that were committed before that event. Their
offence has been dealt with through the i" lasthrion. Thus, God is
seen to be just as judge in dealing with those sins. The second
147
respect is `for the demonstration of his righteousness in the present

time' (Rom. 3.26). The present is the time of the sending and
receiving of the letter, the present for The Apostle and The
Conservative. It is characterized over against the time of God's
wrath by the fact that the i" lasthrion has been set forth, God's
righteousness has been revealed in the new way, believing sinners
are being justied. The purpose of all this is `that he might be
righteous even in justifying the one who believes in Jesus' (Rom.
3.26). The note of surprise in kai is not there because God was
plunged into a dilemma by sin. It is there because The Conservative
has been nding it so hard to believe that the gospel really does
mean that God justies on the basis of faith alone and this should
be reected in JewGentile relationships in the church. " O e!k
pistevq ! Ihsoy stands before God's judgement as a believer. That
is all there is to be said about that person. Nothing else counts.
God, The Apostle has afrmed, is righteous and saving eschatological judge. God saves righteously through the new revelation of
divine righteousness, apart from the law, a redemption which is in
Christ and received by faith. He passes the judgement of justication by dealing with the sin in the very action that conveys the
judgement to the sinner. Acting consistently with his former action
with Israel, and thus showing himself to be Israel's God, he has
broken the bounds of Israel.
This account has resolved The Conservative's dilemma. It has
shown how the insistence on faith as all that is required for
membership of the church arises from what God did in Christ. Far
from showing God as unfaithful to Israel's election, it has proved
to be the means of God's faithfulness. If this is right, The
Conservative has been misunderstanding God's election of Israel.
The Apostle goes on to show that this is so, and to show what is the
proper understanding in the light of God's new action in the Cross.
In reading this pericope we have reaped the harvest of our reexamination of its grammar and meaning in chapter 6. In the
context of the whole, we have been able to see more clearly the
nature of the question that was set over God's righteousness, and
identify the way it is tackled. The result is a reading in which
grammar and meaning cohere, and in which The Conservative's
problem that a God who justies believers without reference to
148
the JewGentile distinction must be unfaithful to the covenant with

Israel is nally overcome.
Rom. 3.22, 26: dia pistevq ! Ihsoy Xristoy; ton e!k pistevq
! Ihsoy: The teleological exposition reects the conclusion that in
each of these phrases the reference is primarily to the faith of the
believer. God's righteousness is manifest and effective through faith
in Jesus Christ for all who believe, not for Jews who believe and
Gentiles who believe and become Jews. God is righteous even in
justifying the one of whom there is nothing to be said but, This
person believes in Jesus. Many scholars now hold that the references are primarily to the faith(fulness) of Christ. Although the
proposal is much older, this case has been argued vigorously from
the 1950s. The debate is remarkable for its inconclusiveness, since
the grammatical/semantic, exegetical and theological evidence is all
capable of being seen to support either case. Why have we not been
persuaded by the arguments for the subjective genitive?
Essentially, this is because we and the participants in the debate
are asking different questions. The case for the subjective genitive is
argued on the assumption that the phrase under consideration is
pistiq Xristoy, that the focussing question is that of the nature of
the genitive, and that the contexts in which Paul uses the phrase are
all concerned with the role of faith in justication. We do not
accept any of these assumptions. The usual procedure is to describe
Paul's concept, decide whether Christ's or the believer's pistiq is
uppermost in it, translate the phrase accordingly, and slot the result
into each of Paul's expositions of justication by faith. We hold
that the phrases have to be considered separately in their contexts,
and a teleological reading can show the context to be more
particular.
The phrases do form a group, and they all appear in what was
apparently a continuing debate which surfaces in several passages
in Paul's letters Rom. 3.216; 4; 9.3010.21; Gal. 2.154.7; Phil.
3.211. The problem was whether Gentiles who believed had to
become Jews, and this takes different forms. These passages
contain about half of all the uses of the pistiqpisteyv vocabulary
in the extant letters. Pistiq often appears in the phrases e!k
pistevq and dia [thq] pistevq, which are contrasted with such
phrases as e!k nomoy and e!j ergvn, and set alongside others with
the same form, such as e!j e!paggeliaq and dia dikaiosynhq
pistevq. In a few cases, e!k/dia pistevq is qualied, usually with
! braam in Rom. 4.16. It seems
! Ihsoy, Xristoy or both, but with A
149
likely that this was a pattern of speech hammered out in the course
of the debates. Accordingly, we have asked not what Paul means by
pistiq Xristoy, but what Paul was intending to communicate to
the church in question with the e!k/dia pistevq phrase qualied
with a name of Christ. This formulation leads us to concur with
Hultgren's proposal that the genitive Xristoy or variant is a
genitive of quality37 `Christ faith' and then to ask in each case
whether the genitive has a subjective or an objective nuance.
We have argued that the issue in Rom. 3.216 is not how people
are justied. The fact that God justies believing sinners is part of
the common ground between The Apostle and The Conservative,
Paul and the Romans. The question is whether God can do that
righteously without requiring believing Gentiles to add something
to their faith in Christ. Accordingly, considering the text as
communication, we conclude that in these two cases the genitive of
quality has an objective nuance, faith in Christ. There is no
question of redundancy in Rom. 3.22, and the subjective genitive
reading is scarcely an option for Rom. 3.26 in the context of our
reading of the whole passage, which has the advantage at Rom.
3.26 of making good sense of the kai. The passage is part of a
debate in which we should expect pistiq to refer to the faith of
believers unless something else was clearly indicated by the context,
as in Rom. 3.3.
This does not mean that we have excluded Christ's faith(fulness)
from Paul's concept of faith, only that we have concluded that Paul
was not talking about it here. He was talking to the Romans about
the relationship between God's righteousness and the faith of
believers. In this discussion, Christ very properly has a completely
passive role. God set him forth.
Rom. 3.22: dikaiosynh de ueoy dia pistevq ! Ihsoy Xristoy
requires some verbal supplement for us to explicate it. Rom. 3.22
continues the sentence begun in Rom. 3.21, with dikaiosynh ueoy
repeated for emphasis. Dia pistevq is the positive completion of
the negative xvriq nomoy. The verb in the context is pefanervtai.
This must carry over for listeners. The choice of dia with pistiq,
however, indicates that the manifest righteousness is not simply
open to view but being seen in action. We have therefore taken the
verbal connection to be `manifest and effective'. By its nature,
God's righteousness could not be manifest without being effective,
37
`The Pistis Christou Formulation in Paul', 257.
150
and it is manifest in the gospel, to believers. As listeners-in, we can

make the conrming observation that this is parallel with the
structure of Rom. 1.1617, although this detail could hardly be still
in the minds of speaker and hearers.
Rom. 3.246: We have read The Apostle's preaching on the basis
that it is an original presentation that relies on concepts familiar to
The Congregation, notably to The Conservative. He is reminding
The Conservative of what he knows about how God justies
believers for the sake of discussing why God does it through the
Cross, and he selects the elements of his reminder accordingly. We
have rejected the hypothesis that Paul modied a traditional
formulation. If that hypothesis were correct, we should need to
consider again what The Apostle is doing. Why have we rejected it?
On what basis have we then understood the difcult terms?
First, we have found it unnecessary. The `problems' that led to
its formulation have not proved to be problems. Dikaioymenoi is
not an impossible disjunction,38 but is properly related to panteq
(Rom. 3.23). On our reading it is thoroughly appropriate, since the
participle links free justication, the new element of equality,
closely with the two already established. The relative o%n could come
from a liturgical setting, but is perfectly natural in the sentence as it
stands.39
Some of the words are said to be un-Pauline, notably
i" lasthrion, ai% ma, paresiq. The only other use of i" lasthrion in
the NT is Heb. 9.5, which is not comparable. Before we call it unPauline we should ask where else in the extant letters we might
expect Paul to use it. Even when this passage is seen as one of
several theoretical accounts of salvation through the Cross, it
would be hard to nd a close parallel where we cannot see good
reasons for the choice of other terms. The reference to blood is part
of the denition of Christ as i" lasthrion, and it is paralleled in
Rom. 5.9, which is an extension of this discussion into its eschatological implications. Similarly, paresiq is to be accepted as Paul's
because of its specic function in the discussion.
The style is sometimes described as oratorical or proclamatory.
This is appropriate to the preaching situation and the subject38
Wengst, Formeln, 87; with BDF 468; Sanday and Headlam, Romans, 856;
Schlier, Der Romerbrief, 107; Kuss, Romerbrief, I, 114.
39
Schlier (Romerbrief, 109) rejects the suggestion that the relative is evidence of a
quotation.
151
matter. The objection to it arises from the unconscious identication of the text as theological exposition. The charge that it is
overloaded is applied especially to the apparent doubling of
dvrean with tBh ay!toy xariti, and to the insertion of dia thq
pistevq between i" lasthrion and ai% ma. In the teleological reading
the former is not a doubling. For the latter, both `faith' and `blood'
are important to The Apostle, and faith, being the point at issue,
should come rst. The main reason for the impression of overload
is the wrong identication of the text as theological exposition of
justication. That makes this passage an unsatisfying climax.
Kasemann nds verses 25 and 26 inconsistent,40 but we do not.
His position is an extreme expression of the problem of traditional
justication readings that it is hard to make sense of Rom.
3.25b26 when dikaiosynh ueoy is seen only as God's saving
action.
The hypothesis of a pre-Pauline formula is weakened by the
demonstration that it is unnecessary, and by the variety of reconstructions offered, but neither of these factors rules it out. We have
rejected it on these grounds together with two more. First, The
Apostle's proclamation is much more specic than Paul's explanation of God's saving action through the Cross in more traditional
interpretations. It is therefore less likely that an appropriate
liturgical formulation would have been available, while the text as
it stands is appropriate to The Apostle's purpose. Second, we
should not expect that quoting and modifying a familiar liturgical
formulation in the course of a longer address would be an effective
way of correcting people's theological understanding. If modern
congregations are any example, such treatment of any formula
sufciently well known to serve the proposed purpose would be
more likely to raise annoyance and hostility.
Dikaioymenoi, Rom. 3.24a: We take this to mean `being given the
verdict Righteous'. That is the issue in The Apostle's preaching,
which is the subject of our teleological reading. The further
question of what Paul understood that it means to be justied
belongs to causal reading.
! polytrvsiq (Rom. 3.24b), i" lasthrion (Rom. 3.25a): These
A
terms The Apostle uses without explanation, obviously assuming
that they are familiar. Whence that familiarity? Why have we
interpreted them as we have? As terms belonging in the gospel
40
152
context, they could be familiar only through worship or teaching.

Both have roots in Jewish tradition. Both are rich images, and
would function as images in worship. In our teleological reading,
we are trying to understand how they would function in the
particular setting of The Apostle's preaching here.
! polytrvsiq means `redemption'. The word would carry echoes
A
of the Exodus and of sacral manumission of slaves. Redemption
normally carries the idea of being bought out of bondage. When
this text is read as theological exposition, this becomes an exegetical
problem. For teleological exposition, the dilemma that has to be
resolved through the action of the eschatological judge controls our
reading. Those who stand before the judge are in bondage to sin,
and redemption is redemption from that bondage. To follow what
is being said, we do not need to know whether The Apostle and
The Conservative, Paul and the Romans, thought of a price being
paid or of God bringing Israel out of Egypt without paying any
price to Pharaoh. Because the communication does not require this,
it would be sheer accident if the information were available from
the context. This is one practical consequence of the fact that the
text is created by the author's intention.
In the mainstream debate, argument rages over the meaning of
i" lasthrion. Again, the problems arise because Paul's account of
the Atonement is being sought and he was not trying to give it. The
few examples in the context literature do not give us a full picture
of the concept i" lasthrion, but we know enough to follow what
The Apostle is saying to The Conservative. A i" lasthrion deals
with the effects of sin, guilt and ever deeper bondage, and that is
why judgement in the form of a i" lasthrion can be a verdict of
Dikaioq on sinners who receive it. Exploring what more we can
learn will help with causal exposition.
Paresiq, Rom. 3.25b: Against the line of interpretation following Kummel's important article,41 we have read `passing over'
not `forgiveness'. Kummel does not consider that he has proved on
linguistic grounds that paresiq should be taken to mean `forgiveness', only that it can very well mean that and this is the reading
that makes sense in the context. This is because he understands the
context as an account of God's saving righteousness, with no issue
of theodicy. The main objection to `passing over' is that it involves
41
`Paresis und Endeixis: Ein Beitrag zum Verstandnis der paulinischen Rechtfertigungslehre'.
153
assigning to the patience of God a time that is before the time

referred to in e!n tCv nyn kairCv, and that time has been characterized
as being under the wrath of God. Wilckens argues convincingly
that the idea of a time in which nal judgement has not yet come
and people are storing up for themselves punishment or reward is
part of the tradition.42 It is taken up in the NT, including Rom.
2.410.
Rom. 3.274.25 teleological exposition
The Apostle has shown The Conservative that God is indeed
righteous in justifying believers on the basis of faith without
distinguishing between Jew and Gentile. The good news of salvation through Christ at the nal judgement is the fullment of God's
faithfulness to Israel not to righteous and oppressed Israel over
against the Gentiles, but to unfaithful Israel, standing with the
Gentiles before God's judgement. But there is more to the claim
that Israel's election is not cancelled by the gospel. The Apostle
now turns to helping The Conservative to see Israel's history in the
light of God's new action in Christ, showing him that this apparently new thing was God's intention in the election of Israel.
In handling this issue, The Apostle is again moving close to the
question of The Conservative's understanding of his own identity.
He aims to lead him into a truer but different understanding.
Because it is different, and it demands changes to deep-seated
attitudes and cherished practices, it will not be easy to accept. Once
again, he uses the question and answer technique that draws in the
listener.
He raises the question of boasting. Boasting is the expression of
the way The Conservative misunderstood the meaning of election
and the gift of the Torah that symbolized it. `Where, then' in the
light of God's action in Christ (oy(n, Rom. 3.27) ìs boasting? It is
excluded. By what kind of a law?' The Apostle suggests rst the
answer he provided earlier. The Conservative was forced to recognize that Israel's boasting over against the Gentiles was excluded by
failure to demonstrate superiority in living out the law. Instead, the
law set Israel with the Gentiles under God's judgement (Rom.
2.1724; 3.920). [Nomoq] tvn ergvn (Rom. 3.27) would have been
the answer if the question had been asked after Rom. 3.20, but now
42
154
The Apostle rejects it. In the light of God's action in Christ,

boasting is excluded by a different kind of law, a law of faith. He
denes this: logizomeua gar dikaioysuai pistei anurvpon xvriq
ergvn nomoy (Rom. 3.28). His denition provides a summary of
the relevance of his previous point (Rom. 3.216) for the question
he is now asking. He is making a wry pun on nomoq. The
Conservative has been thinking of God's self-revelation in Israel's
Torah in terms of the Mosaic law understood especially as
commandment requiring obedient action. God's righteousness has
now been revealed both xvriq nomoy and martyroymenh y"po toy
nomoy (Rom. 3.21), and the revelation has confronted him with a
new `law', the principle of justication on the basis of faith alone.
The law of works excludes the boast Israel had thought she had;
the law of faith excludes the possibility of having a boast. Now it is
not Israel's failure that excludes boasting, but God's gracious
action in Christ.
Furthermore, if The Conservative really believes that God is one,
he should be able to see that this is only right. Ìs God the God of
the Jews only? Is he not God of the Gentiles also? Yes, of the
Gentiles also. If God, who will justify the circumcision on the basis
of faith, really is one, he will also justify the uncircumcision
through faith' (Rom. 3.2930). The Conservative with his monotheistic faith takes it as axiomatic that Israel's God is God of the
Gentiles also. God's oneness has a consequence he must take to
heart: the one God of both will treat Gentiles as he treats Jews,
justifying on the basis of faith. This, The Apostle has shown, God
does and does righteously (Rom. 3.216).
In the earlier discussion, The Apostle has shown The Conservative that Jewish sinner is no different from Gentile sinner before
God's judgement. Eventually, it seemed that there was nothing left
of God's covenant with Israel, and The Apostle confronted The
Conservative with some of the inconsistencies in his thinking (Rom.
3.18). Now, on the positive side, The Apostle has shown that
justied Jew is no different from justied Gentile before God's
grace. Again, The Conservative is troubled. Is there anything left of
God's election of Israel? Once Israel's difference has gone, it seems
that Israel's election has gone. Thus The Conservative faces again
the vital question about God's faithfulness. The Apostle states it as
sharply as possible: nomon oy(n katargoymen dia thq pistevq;
(Rom. 3.31a).
This is a question about what `we' do. It is not asking whether
155
God has made the law of no effect. It is asking whether `we', the
discussion partners, have reached a point in our engagement with
the gospel where we are faced with this unacceptable conclusion. If
so, `we' are wrong and shall have to try again. The question is not
just about the nomoq as the commandments, but about the whole
Torah. The Torah shapes Jewish life and mediates the consciousness of being God's people. The law of commandments is a tangible
symbol of this. Through keeping the commandments Israel is
marked off from the Gentiles, and the commandments have forced
up the issue sharply in the life of the church.
Having posed the question thus sharply, The Apostle negates it
as sharply: mh genoito. a!lla nomon i" stanomen (Rom. 3.31b). In
preaching this gospel, we most certainly do not make the Torah
of no effect. On the contrary, we establish it. We establish the
Torah, the symbol of God's faithfulness and call. We do so by
showing that it cannot provide a ground for boasting, a basis for
expecting privileged treatment from God which seems to be
tantamount to taking away its role as instrument and mark of
Israel's identity. If The Apostle can establish this claim, The
Conservative's problems will be more than overcome. He will be
able to see himself and the church as participating in the fullment
of God's purpose. But can The Apostle establish it? The grounds
on which he might do so could hardly be said to spring to mind
without further prompting!
The Apostle invites The Conservative to look carefully at
Abraham, beginning with a question that is challenging almost to
the point of being offensive: `What, then, shall we say? That we
have found Abraham to be our forefather according to the esh?'
(Rom. 4.1). The Conservative will certainly want to give a strongly
negative answer. As a Jew, he will nd a conclusion that Abraham
is forefather kata sarka wholly inadequate. Jews do not revere
Abraham simply because they are descended from him. What
makes Abraham a gure to be reverenced is the fact that God made
the covenant with Abraham. He is propatvr. In him Israel is elect.
As a Jew who believes in Christ, The Conservative will have other
reasons for nding the conclusion unacceptable. If `we', the `we' of
Rom. 3.31, have searched the scriptures and our hearts and the
church's experience of God's action, and have found that for
believers Abraham is reduced to being forefather kata sarka, then
election and the covenant have gone for nothing and the God of
the gospel is not the faithful God of Israel.
156
If The Apostle's claim (Rom. 3.31b) is to stand, the answer to the

question should be, No, we have not found Abraham to be our
forefather kata sarka. The Apostle does not answer with mh
! braam e!j
genoito. Instead, he comments on the question: ei! gar A
ergvn e!dikaivuh, exei kayxhma (Rom. 4.2a). If Abraham has
ground for boasting, he will be cut off from all whose failure to live
up to the law excluded boasting (Rom. 3.27a), and he will be a
witness against the `law of faith' (Rom. 3.27b28) which denies The
Apostle and The Conservative any possibility of having ground for
boasting. Their connection with Abraham will be reduced to
physical descent, he will be forefather kata sarka, and The
Apostle's claim will fall.
The Apostle's comment is worded to allow the possibility that
Abraham was justied on the basis of works. In that case he would
be not only a witness against the `law of faith' (Rom. 3.278) but
also a witness for The Conservative's old idea of Israel's election
(Rom. 2.1720). If Abraham has ground for boasting, God started
out in Israel's election by justifying on the basis of doing the law.
His new action is then inconsistent with the Torah. He has been
unfaithful to elect Israel. But The Apostle asserts that Abraham
has no ground for boasting before God (Rom. 4.2b). Gen. 15.6 is
the basis for that assertion, and he introduces it with a ourish to
mark its importance: ti gar h" grafh legei; (Rom. 4.3a).43 The
! braam tCv ueCv kai e!logisuh ay!tCv
scripture says, e!pisteysen de A
ei! q dikaiosynhn (Rom. 4.3b). Abraham has no ground for boasting
because he `believed God and it was reckoned to him for righteousness'. Is that unassailable ground for saying that Abraham has
no kayxhma and so cannot have been justied on the basis of
works?
In the context of Rom. 3.218, it would be. There, people have
no boast through the law and, being justied on the basis of faith,
are justied apart from works. Rom. 4.23 moves Abraham from
being justied e!j ergvn to being justied e!k pistevq. But this
distinction is part of the new gospel context The Apostle has been
creating, the new context that has forced the question, nomon oy(n
katargoymen dia thq pistevq; (Rom. 3.31a). In The Conservative's
old context, things are different. Abraham's righteousness is closely
connected with works, even with works of the law:
43
In a few cases where a scripture citation is very important, we see Paul using a
substantial introductory question like this Gal. 4.30; Rom. 11.4.
157
For Abraham was perfect in all of his actions with the

Lord and was pleasing through righteousness all of the
days of his life.
(Jub. 23.10a)
! braam o" pathr soy thq e!mhq fvnhq kai
y"phkoysen A
!efylajen ta prostagmata moy kai taq e!ntolaq moy kai ta
dikaivmata moy kai ta nomima moy.
(Gen. 26.5, LXX)
Moreover, Abraham's pistiq makes him pistoq, faithful, and this
is reckoned to him for righteousness:
! braam oy!xi e!n peirasmCv ey"reuh pistoq, kai e!logisuh
A
ay!tCv ei! q dikaiosynhn;
(1 Macc. 2.52)
He is seen in this light in the very context of the giving of the
covenant:
! braam megaq pathr plhuoyq e!unvn,
A
kai oy!x ey"reuh o%moioq e!n tBh dojBh.
o^q synethrhsen nomon y"cistoy
kai e!geneto e!n diauhkBh met' ay!toy.
e!n sarki ay!toy esthsen diauhkhn
kai e!n peirasmCv ey"reuh pistoq.
dia toyto e!n o%rkCv esthsen ay!tCv
e!neyloghuhnai eunh e!n spermati ay!toy,
plhuynai ay!ton v"q xoyn thq ghq
kai v"q astra a!nycvsai to sperma ay!toy
kai kataklhronomhsai ay!toyq
a!po ualasshq e%vq ualasshq
kai a!po potamoy e%vq akroy thq ghq.
(Sir. 44.1921)
Accordingly, Gen. 15.6 must be shown to be ground for saying that

Abraham has no boast before God and thus was not justied on
the basis of works. The text is well chosen. Abraham's pistiq
appears in verb form: e!pisteysen, he believed. Further, the word
of God that he believed was the promise of innumerable seed.
The Apostle goes on to build on the advantage. In the matter of
reckoning righteousness, he separates faith from works: `Now for
one who works, the reward is not reckoned as a matter of grace,
but as a matter of obligation' (Rom. 4.4). In that case he has earned
his reward and has a claim on the giver. He is like the Jew, whoever
he was, who expected God to vindicate righteous and oppressed
Israel. This is the case of the one who has ground for boasting. `But
to the one who does not work but trusts in the one who justies the
158
ungodly, his faith is reckoned for righteousness' (Rom. 4.5). This is

the case of Abraham, the reckoning of Gen. 15.6. In Rom. 4.68,
The Apostle supports this with a quotation from Ps. 31.12a
(LXX). It speaks of the blessedness of those to whom righteousness
is reckoned apart from works as the blessedness of those whose sins
the Lord does not reckon, again placing Abraham with the
believers of Rom. 3.218. God began with Abraham as he intended
to go on with believers in Christ.
The Apostle has made his case for saying that Abraham has no
ground for boasting, so that `we' have not reduced him to being
forefather kata sarka (Rom. 4.1) and thus made the Torah of no
effect (Rom. 3.31a). He is not, however, aiming for that merely
negative point, so he goes on immediately with the rest of his
answer. The nature of Abraham's forefatherhood does not depend
simply on Abraham, but also on the nature of his seed. The next
step (oy(n, Rom. 4.9a) is to ask whether this blessing is on the
circumcision (which can be taken for granted) or also on the
uncircumcision. He directs attention again to Gen. 15.6, the basis
of the argument, summarizing the relevant point rather than
! braam h"
repeating the whole verse: legomen gar. e!logisuh tCv A
pistiq ei! q dikaiosynhn (Rom. 4.9b). Thus, he equates Abraham's
pistiq with his believing, and directs attention again to the reckoning of righteousness. In Rom. 4.10, he draws the conclusion very
carefully. He does not simply give the answer, but takes The
Conservative through a question and answer process that gives him
no chance to miss the point. Pvq oy(n e!logisuh; (Rom. 4.10a). The
possible alternatives are set out, and only then is the conclusion
drawn, rst negatively and then positively. Abraham's faith was
reckoned to him for righteousness when he was in a state of
uncircumcision, not of circumcision, and he received the sign of
circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had while he was
still uncircumcised (Rom. 4.10b11a). It happened this way so that
he should be father of the uncircumcised who believe, so that their
faith will be reckoned to them for righteousness, and father of the
circumcised who are not only circumcised but walk in the footsteps
of the faith our father Abraham had while uncircumcised (Rom.
4.11b12). Abraham's story interprets the symbol of circumcision.
The Apostle can now say, We have found Abraham to be our
forefather not kata sarka but kata pistin. He has not, however,
nished with his question. He asked it for the sake of demonstrating that this gospel establishes the Torah (Rom. 3.31). Abra-
159
ham's story is The Conservative's story, and there is more to

explore.
`For (gar) the promise to Abraham and his seed that they should
inherit the world was not through law but through the righteousness of faith' (Rom. 4.13). That is, the seed had to be seed on the
basis of faith to match the nature of the promise, for if only those
who were seed on the basis of law were heirs, faith would have been
emptied so why justify Abraham on the basis of faith? and the
promise brought to nothing (Rom. 4.14). This is because the law
works wrath, as the discussion of God's righteous judgement has
shown painfully clearly (Rom. 4.15a; 2.123.20). The promise
operates in a different framework (Rom. 4.15b). It is because of
this reality of fallen human life that the promise is on the basis of
faith, so that it is a matter of grace (Rom. 4.16a). Promise is not by
denition separate from law. There is such a thing as a conditional
promise: Ì will give you this land if . . .'. God's promise is not
conditional, because to be capable of fullment it must rest on
God's grace alone.
Not only did the seed have to be dened by faith to match the
promise, but the promise had to be by faith to match the seed. In
Abraham's story, the seed to whom the promise was made were
themselves children of promise. That promise made Abraham the
father not just of numberless descendants (Gen. 15.5; 22.17) but of
many nations (Rom. 4.17a; Gen. 17.46; Sir. 44.19a). So The
Apostle says that it had to be by grace to be rm for all the seed,
not only those who were seed on the basis of the law, but also the
`faith seed' of Abraham, the father of us believers, Jew and Gentile.
This fact cannot be stressed too much in the face of The Conservative's lifelong presuppositions. Abraham is the father of us all,
according to the authority of scripture and through the promise in
scripture. He is the father of us all in the sight of God in whom he
believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that
are not. The Conservative can recognize that God as Israel's44 and
also as the God of those who believe in Christ (Rom. 4.17b).
Believing Abraham is father of the seed dened by faith, and he
became father through his faith (ei! q to genesuai, Rom. 4.18). The
Apostle describes this faith. Abraham believed in hope against
hope, and he did not weaken in unbelief when he considered the
44
cf. Philo, Spec. Leg. IV.187; 2 Baruch 48.8; Joseph and Aseneth 8.9. Kasemann
cites the second of the Eighteen Benedictions (Commentary on Romans, 121).
160
human realities of the situation, which put the fullment of the

promise beyond human hope (Rom. 4.19).45 Rather, he trusted
God's promise, not wavering in unbelief, but being strengthened in
faith. `Giving glory to God and being fully persuaded that what he
has promised he is indeed able to do' (Rom. 4.20b21) is almost a
parallel pair. In believing, Abraham was giving glory to God.
Abraham's faith glories God by acknowledging him as God.
Therefore, says The Apostle, it was reckoned to him for righteousness (Rom. 4.22). This completes the exposition of Gen. 15.6.
The important thing about faith is that it gives glory to God. It
acknowledges the God who gives life to the dead and calls into
being things that are not.
The Apostle has shown in the story of Abraham and his
fatherhood a tightly woven web of action and promise which
demonstrates overwhelmingly that God intended from the beginning that Israel's election should be fullled, through faith, in
blessing on both Jew and Gentile.
Beginning to turn from The Conservative to direct address to
The Congregation, The Apostle goes on to relate the story to the
church's situation. Ìt was reckoned to him' was written not only
because of him, the central human character of the story, but also
for our sake, to whom it is going to be reckoned (Rom. 4.234a).
That is, the statement was written for this new group of people to
whom faith is going to be reckoned as righteousness. Their faith is
in `the one who raised from the dead our Lord Jesus, who was
given up for our sins and raised for our justication' (Rom.
4.24b25). It is in Abraham's God, who has fullled the promise to
Abraham and his seed. Why did they need the statement? Not
simply to reassure them that faith is all they need, but to show
them that the God whose new action in Christ calls forth their faith
is indeed the God of Abraham and can be trusted. Rom. 4.25, with
its poetic balance and credal ring, provides a conclusion satisfying
for The Conservative and pointing again to the foundation of the
whole matter, and of the church's life, God's action through
Christ.
By asking about the nature of Abraham's forefatherhood and
developing the answer through his exposition of Gen. 15.6, The
Apostle has shown that the gospel of salvation for all who believe
45
Accepting that oy! is not to be read. With Metzger, A Textual Commentary on
the Greek New Testament, 451; Ziesler, Romans, 133; Wilckens, Der Brief an die
Romer, I, 276, n. 895.
161
establishes the Torah in the very process of making Jew and

Gentile equal before the grace of God. This is the fullment of the
purpose for which God elected Israel, the bearers of the promise
given to Abraham. The Conservative can live out his new faith in
the condence that in doing so he, too, will be giving glory to God.
Rom. 3.274.25 methodological commentary
The teleological reading shows again the effect of recognizing that
this is a pastoral text, created in particular circumstances. Again,
we have been reading it as address to The Conservative as
representative of particular people facing the problems of living out
the gospel they have received. Again, we are recognizing that these
believers still think of themselves as Jews and Gentiles. The framework within which the familiar terms are working is created not by
the general distinction between Jew and Gentile, but by these
particular Jews and Gentiles living together in the community of
faith. Read in this way, the passage appears as a unity, with a
coherent and important contribution to make to the whole of Rom.
1.164.25, and to Paul's purpose in the letter.
This awareness of the particularity of The Apostle's address
shows in the treatment of several exegetical problems. In the
concrete context of the discussion so far we identied the kayxhsiq
of Rom. 3.27 as the boasting of Jew over against Gentile rather
than boasting as the opposite of faith as a human attitude to God.
Similarly, we understand nomoq not by asking after the meaning of
the concept in this passage but by looking at the reference of the
term in each of its uses. Thus, a law of works is Israel's Torah
misunderstood as in Rom. 2.1720, while a law of faith is God's
action summarized in Rom. 3.28. In Rom. 3.31, the referent is not
obvious, and we turn to the immediate context and the context of
the letter so far. Again, we trace the way the discussion of the
promise in Rom. 4.1318 is focussed on the history of this
promise. The Apostle argues that the promise had to be through
faith and the seed had to be dened by faith. He shows this by
reference to what happened, not by discussing the nature of
promise in relation to law and faith. For instance, we understand
the statement that the law works wrath by reference to the earlier
discussion, rather than by seeing it as a statement about the nature
of law.
Rom. 3.28: The gar shows this sentence to be the ground for the
162
assertion that boasting is excluded by a nomoq pistevq. It is a

summary of the content of Rom. 3.216 as it affects this question.
The Apostle summarizes the anthropocentric pole of his argument
about how God is righteous in justifying believers.
Rom. 3.2930: We have accepted the view of Stowers46 and
Hays47 that ei per should be given its proper conditional force and
the construction read as elliptical. Hays' ellipsis of the verb in the
apodosis is preferable to Stowers' treatment, which retains the
nuance that the one God will treat the two groups alike. Our
teleological exposition has opened our eyes to the possibility of a
reading that sees God treating Gentiles as he is known to treat
Jews. This suits Paul's sentence structure better, and relates closely
to the way the question was posed. The Apostle did not ask
whether God is one, but whether Israel's God is not also God of
the Gentiles. He is dealing with The Conservative's problem that
God does not distinguish between Jewish and Gentile believers.
This is an intra-church question.
Rom. 3.314.3: The challenge is to make sense of the logical
connections.
Given the role of the Torah as the symbol of God's election of
Israel and the focus of Israel's identity as God's people, we can see
in general terms why Abraham would be discussed to establish that
the gospel does not make the nomoq of no effect (Rom. 3.31). This
is a specic form of the problem that if Paul's gospel cuts the
church off from Israel, it has cut away its own basis. It is at Rom.
4.2 that we as listeners-in feel that The Apostle and The Conservative have moved off into a debate in which we do not participate.
The implication of the link formed by gar, the direction of the
discussion, and The Apostle's statement that Abraham does not
have ground for boasting before God seems to be that if The
Conservative wants to say that Abraham was justied on the basis
of works, he will have to say that Abraham has ground for
boasting, and that will force him to conclude that Abraham is
forefather kata sarka. It is clear from the text that if Abraham
was justied on the basis of works and therefore has ground for
boasting, he will be cut off from all who have no ground for
boasting who, according to Rom. 3.278, would be both Israel
with the mistaken understanding of her election, and believers in
46
47
The Diatribe and Paul's Letter to the Romans, 1647, esp. 1667.
Àbraham', 845.
163
Christ, Jewish and Gentile, who are justied on the basis of faith
apart from works. What has that to do with Abraham being ton
propatora h"mvn kata sarka? For The Apostle and The Conservative as believing Jews, it would reduce their connection with
Abraham to physical descent. Then he would be forefather kata
sarka. We can examine the text and work that out. Romans was
dictated and meant to be heard: the most attentive listener could
hardly be expected to go through such a process. We therefore
presume that the letter was operating in a context in which a
listener would be able to follow without having to think it out step
by step. We need to identify that context.
Here and in Galatians, we have snippets of the debate about
whether Gentiles who believed the gospel had to be circumcised. As
Barrett argues, at least one approach to the question was to argue
that believers receive the promise made to Abraham and his seed,
and must therefore be seed of Abraham.48 Paul's position was that
being a believer in itself made one seed of Abraham because
Abraham was reckoned righteous on the basis of believing in God.
Abraham would then be forefather kata pistin. An opposing
position was that to be eligible to receive the blessing through
believing, one must belong to the seed of Abraham, the covenant
people, either by birth or by proselytism. Abraham would then be
forefather kata sarka. That debate provides the necessary context
for these few verses. Our identication of it is vindicated by the fact
that it yields a reading of the whole chapter as a coherent and
persuasive presentation of the call of Abraham as the one in whom
the covenant and election were given. It can be seen again in the
discussion of the promise in Rom. 4.1317. In Rom. 4.13,
h" e!paggelia . . . to klhronomon ay!ton ei(nai kosmoy indicates that
Paul was not giving an exegesis of Gen. 15.7, 1821; 17.8, where
the inheritance of the land, h" gh, is promised. Rather, he was
referring to the promise as it was understood in this debate, as a
promise that could be and was being fullled to Jewish and Gentile
believers. It was being held together with the promise in Gen. 12.3;
22.18 of blessing for all the nations through Abraham. We can see
this in Gal. 3.64.7, and Rom. 4.235. It represents a development
in the understanding of the promise, so that the eschatological
blessings constitute the inheritance. Such a development can be
glimpsed in some other Jewish literature. The promise becomes a
48
Freedom and Obligation, 225.
164
promise of the whole earth (Sir. 44.21b; Jub. 22.14; 32.19) and,
further, the idea of promise is associated with the blessings of the
righteous at the End (4 Ezra 7.119; 2 Baruch 44.1315; 51.3;
57.13; 59.2).49
Rom. 4.1: `What, then, shall we say? That we have found
Abraham to be our forefather according to the esh?' This reading
is not new,50 but a case still needs to be argued for accepting it.
The reading of K et al., ti oyn eroymen Abraam ton patera
hmvn eyrhkenai kata sarka, has no signicant support in the
modern debate. It is suspiciously easy, since it takes the anarthrous
phrase kata sarka with ey"rhkenai, smoothing the grammar. The
reading of patera instead of propatora appears to be a substitution of the familiar term for a rare one. It is difcult to explain the
other readings from it. The loss of ey"rhkenai in the B reading
could have been a copyist's slip, but there is nothing to prompt it.
There is no apparent reason for correcting either grammar or sense
! braam. Further, this reading is open to all the
by placing it before A
objections to having at this point an unanswered question about
what Abraham found.
It will be convenient to consider together the readings of B et al.,
ti oyn eroymen Abraam ton propatora hmvn kata sarka, and of
Q et al., ti oyn eroymen eyrhkenai Abraam ton propatora hmvn
kata sarka. There is considerable support, especially Western, for
the latter with patera. While this can be rejected with some
condence, we have let it remind us that Paul may have chosen the
unusual term to stress Abraham's role.
The two major readings can be punctuated and understood as
follows:
B et al.
! braam ton propatora h"mvn kata
1. ti oy(n e!roymen A
sarka;
What, then, shall we say about Abraham our forefather
according to the esh?
! braam ton propatora h"mvn kata
2. ti oy(n; e!roymen A
sarka;
What then? Shall we call Abraham our forefather according to the esh?
49
See Byrne, Reckoning with Romans, 94; `Sons of God' `Seed of Abraham', 157.
Recently, Hays (Àbraham', 813), citing Zahn; Elliott, The Rhetoric of
Romans, 1589; Cranford, Àbraham in Romans 4'.
50
165
Q et al.
! braam ton propatora
3. ti oy(n e!roymen ey"rhkenai A
h"mvn kata sarka;
What, then, shall we say that Abraham our forefather
according to the esh has found?
! braam ton propatora
4. ti oy(n e!roymen; ey"rhkenai A
"hmvn kata sarka;
What, then, shall we say? That we have found Abraham
(to be) our forefather according to the esh?
In terms of grammar and style, a case can be made for each of
these.
Numbers 1 and 3 take kata sarka adjectivally. Strictly speaking,
this requires the article, but in Rom. 9.3 the phrase can only be
intended adjectivally. The objection is not insuperable.
Some scholars nd the construction in Number 1 difcult. For
Wilckens, it is intolerable without peri.51 On the other hand,
Sanday and Headlam offer John 1.15 (oy_toq h(n o^n ei(pon) as a
parallel,52 and Schlatter interprets it as a perfectly good Greek
question with the advantage of not requiring an answer.53
Number 2 seems to be a straightforward use of a verb of saying
with two accusatives, and is recognizable, diatribal style.
For Number 3, Hays objects that the perfect ey"rhkenai would
need to be explained, since what long-dead Abraham found would
normally be expressed with an aorist.54 On the other hand,
Abraham is very much alive in the exei of Rom. 4.2.
Number 4, which we accept, is rarely considered. It has the
advantages of retaining `we' as the subject, following Rom. 3.31,
and of allowing ti oy(n e!roymen to function in diatribal style.
Diatribal style suits the context, but this consideration is not
decisive. Paul's use of e!rv as a kind of logical future in the dialogue
style of Romans is very exible.55 On the other hand there is no
other example in the extant letters of its use in dialogue simply as
the opening of a substantial question. (Rom. 8.31a is simply an
expanded ti oy(n e!roymen;) There are several examples in Paul's
51
52
53
54
55

Romans, 99.
Gottes Gerechtigkeit, 159.
Àbraham', 801.
Rom 3.5; 8.31; 9.19, 20; 11.19.
166
letters of ey"riskein used as in this verse to nd somebody to be

something with ei(nai not expressed.56 The construction is
described in BDF 396: Ìn classical Greek the complement of verbs
of . . . saying which indicate the content of the concept or communication, is formed to a great extent by the innitive. If the subject
is the same as that of the governing verb it is not expressed.' Dunn
objects to applying this to Rom. 4.1, saying that an accusative and
innitive construction at the beginning of a sentence with the
accusative unstated `would be rather odd'.57 This objection would
carry weight in the case of an ordinary, independent sentence,
especially in writing. Here, however, we are considering a mannerism of diatribal speech in a text that was spoken and intended to
be heard. The two sentences comprise one sense unit. The same can
be seen in the English. `That we have found Abraham to be our
forefather according to the esh' is intolerable as an independent
sentence in written English, yet the two sentences together constitute spoken English so normal that the meaning is accepted without
the hearer, or even a reader, noticing the grammar. If Paul had
supplied the h"maq, he would have produced an excessive stress
analogous to, although not as heavy as, the one that would be
created in English by, `What, then, shall we say? Shall we say that
we have found . . .?'
Thus, considerations of grammar and style do not exclude any of
the possibilities offered by the B and Q readings. We turn to textual
and exegetical considerations. The Q reading is the better attested.
Further, it is hard to explain the rise of the other two readings from
B. The best line of explanation is that ey"rhkenai was supplied as
clarication and then moved because the intended clarication was
not understood, but if the scribe read the B text as two questions it
is hard to see why the clarication was wanted, and if he read it as
one it is hard to see what ey"rhkenai would clarify. The other two
readings can be explained from the Q reading as independent
alterations, the loss of ey"rhkenai being scribal error arising from
the similar beginnings of eyrhkenai and eroymen, and its repositioning being an effort to correct a difcult text.
On the basis of the argument so far, the reading of Q et al. should
be accepted. To choose between the two ways of punctuating it, we
56
The closest are 1 Cor. 15.15; Gal. 2.17. Hays (Àbraham', 82) cites these and
several which have a predicate adjective.
57
Romans, 199.
167
turn to exegetical considerations. How is the question functioning

in the context? That is, why does it arise, how is it answered, how
does the answer contribute to the discussion as a whole? What is
the point of kata sarka? Within the mainstream debate, the onesentence form is widely preferred, not to the two-sentence form
(which is rarely considered) but to the one-sentence form of the B
reading. It is accepted as the better-attested and more difcult
reading, and exegetes make the best of it.
Familiarity has dulled our awareness of the magnitude of the
problems it brings. With this reading, Paul's procedure is remarkable for its extraordinary ineffectiveness as communication, particularly in the oral setting, and for its uniqueness. Nowhere else in
the extant letters does he proceed as he would be doing here. With
the one-sentence reading, he poses a critically important question
(Rom. 3.31a), rejects it with a claim that is worthless unless it is
immediately substantiated (Rom. 3.31b), and then asks a question
that has no obvious relevance to the preceding claim and contains a
throw-away phrase (kata sarka) that is controversial enough to
distract most of his audience from what he is about to say (Rom.
4.1). An answer to the question might reveal its relevance, but
instead of providing one he goes on with a discussion which is only
tangentially relevant and from which the audience could have
deduced an answer (if they were still interested!) by the time it was
well developed (Rom. 4.5). A little later, he takes up the issue raised
by the throw-away phrase, showing that it was inappropriate
(Rom. 4.912).
Solutions have been proposed for some of these problems. The
most widely accepted solution to the problem that the question is
not answered is Michel's suggestion that it operates by allusion to
the Septuagint expression ey"riskein xarin, which applies to
Abraham in Gen. 18.3.58 This has the advantages that grace is an
important concept in the context and that the allusion method can
be allowed to supply the answer with the question. On the other
hand, it is hard to see any reason why the incident in Gen. 18.3
would be so much in the forefront of Paul's mind as to shape his
question. The fact that the phrase is common in the Septuagint still
leaves us with an unsatisfactory explanation, especially as the
concept of grace is not explicit in the discussion that led to the
question of Rom. 3.31a. When we assume that Paul's mind was
58
Der Brief an die Romer, 161.
168
occupied with the attempt to engage the Romans, it seems extremely unlikely. Again, there is no other instance in the extant
letters of a question that depends on allusion either for its intelligibility or for its answer, let alone for both. This solution occurs to a
reader after long study of a puzzle. For our effort to elucidate what
Paul was intending the Romans to hear, it is a counsel of despair.
Black's proposal that there could be an allusion to Sir. 44.19
(oy!x ey"reuh o%moioq e!n tBh dojBh) is offered in the context of his
despair.59 Allusion to e!n peirasmCv ey"reuh pistoq (Sir. 44.20; 1
Macc. 2.52) is even less helpful.60 It is not impossible that these
echoes might have been in Paul's mind, or even that one or two of
the listeners might have picked up one of them, but they do not
offer an explanation of what Paul was intending to communicate.
Another approach is to propose alternative translations of the
question. Black considers a Hebraism, `What then shall we say
befell Abraham . . .?' 61 Dunn offers, `What did Abraham nd to be
the case . . .?' 62 (`What, then, shall we say that Abraham our
forefather according to the esh has found to be the case?') These
share the virtue of the one-sentence form of the B reading. They do
little more than introduce Abraham. On the other hand, they are
not obvious readings of the Greek for o" a!naginvskvn, they are not
effective introductions to what follows, and they do not account for
kata sarka.
A few exegetes, notably Schlatter, have recognized the importance of kata sarka at this point.63 In Paul's usage, sarj has
various connotations, not all of them pejorative. His use of kata
sarka, though, is always limiting. In this category are the two
references to Christ (Rom. 1.3; 9.5), and the reference to Jews as
brothers kata sarka (Rom. 9.3 cf. 1 Cor. 10.18). In the discussion
in Galatians about who are heirs of Abraham and the promise, the
phrase is set over against both promise (Gal. 4.23) and Spirit (Gal.
4.29). The other uses are less directly related to this issue, but also
have negative overtones, some even polemical: Rom. 8.4, 5, 13; 1
Cor. 1.26; 2 Cor. 1.17; 5.16; 10.2, 3; 11.18. This evidence reinforces
the view that in the context of Rom. 3.274.25, the phrase is not a
merely neutral reference to physical generation. At least, it places
59
60
61
62
63
Romans, 75.
Ibid., 75; Dunn, Romans, 199.
Romans, 74.
Ibid., 198.
Gottes Gerechtigkeit, 15960.
169
limits on Abraham's fatherhood; at most, it already carries the

implication that gospel and covenant are incompatible and that
means that God is not faithful. (This paragraph is an example of
looking up a word in the context literature. The evidence helps us
to bridge the two-millennia gap between us and Paul, but for
teleological reading it can be used only in the context of the
evidence of the text being read. In this case, it checks and supports
the reading we developed in the context of The Apostle's address to
The Conservative.)
In the light of this exploration, the two-sentence punctuation
demands serious consideration, even if the one grammatical/
stylistic objection against it could stand. We have argued that it
does not. Our teleological reading shows it yielding sense that
makes the whole of Romans 4 a coherent contribution to The
Apostle's purpose in Rom. 1.164.25. The chapter is seen as
providing a proper answer to the question of Rom. 3.31. If the B
reading is correct, its two-sentence form would function in the
same way.
Rom. 4.12: We accept that toiq is not to be read with stoixoysin. The fact that the toiq stands and has not generated text
variants challenges all our readings of the sense of the passage, and
any reading that would accommodate it deserves attention. Cerfaux's carefully argued attempt to do this64 involves a spiritualizing
of circumcision at this point and an argument that Gentile
Christians are superior to Jewish Christians. He makes a case for
this in terms of the wider context of Paul's thought as he understands it. It seems extremely unlikely in the immediate context
because there are no indicators visible to us that would mark the
change to spiritual circumcision and it is no part of Paul's aim in
Romans to argue that believers in Christ are the true circumcision
(cf. Phil. 3.3; Col. 2.11). In favour of accepting toiq as an error,
even in Paul's dictation of the complex sentence, is the placing of
oy!k . . . monon.
Rom. 4.13: The gar can have its full logical sense only if the
nature of Abraham's fatherhood, and therefore of his seed, is being
shown to be necessary because of the nature of the promise.
Rom. 4.16: The argument comes perilously close to being
circular: the fact that the seed had to be e!k pistevq to match the
nature of the promise of the inheritance runs into the fact that the
64
Àbraham ``pere en circoncision'' des gentils'.
170
promise of the inheritance had to be e!k pistevq not only because it

could not be fullled if it were e!k toy nomoy, but also because it
had to match the promise that Abraham would be the father of
many nations (Rom. 4.17a). All that saves it from circularity is the
fact that the seed promise is independent action of God. This
demonstrates the consistency of God's intention and action.
11
TESTING THE TELEOLOGICAL READING
We have tried to trace what the implied author is saying to the

implied audience, and especially to the narratee, in Rom.
1.164.25. Before we can offer that as our reading of what Paul
was intending the Romans to hear, it must pass the tests we
established in chapter 9.
1. It must account for all of the text,1 making sense of it as
coherent communication accessible to the intended audience, and
overcoming the intractable problems we identied in chapter 2.
2. It must function as part of the whole meaning of Romans. It
must work as the rst step of the preaching we hypothesized in
chapter 7, accommodating the passages not obviously related to the
JewGentile issue, or correct our hypothesis. It must be compatible
with the justication theology as a related element of meaning in
Rom. 1.164.25, or demonstrate very convincingly that we were
wrong in believing that the tradition of exegesis has not been a
tradition of eisegesis.
3. It must either be something we can accept that Paul could
have said in the situation or force us to ask reasonable questions
about our understanding of the situation and/or of Paul.
Test 1 making sense of all of the text
The teleological reading has made sense of all of the text as speech
with its quality of linearity. There is no point where the listening
Romans could not reasonably be expected to follow, and listeners
are helped by such things as introductory questions, question and
answer sequences, the use of familiar ideas, and interaction with
their experience. The three major problems which appeared insoluble in a justication reading have disappeared.
1
For this important concept, see above, pp. 423.
171
172
Rom. 1.183.20 was not intended to convince the Romans that

everybody is a sinner needing rescue from God's condemnation.
The Apostle was aiming to lead The Conservative to see that his
presuppositions would not hold. Paul must have had to learn that
himself, and it is reasonable to suppose that he would make this
case for the Romans. Some of them would be like The Conservative; others would relate to it differently. The problem of righteous
Gentiles in Romans 2 disappears, and Rom. 3.18 ts into the
discussion as a forceful confrontation with a basic problem.
The imbalances in the whole passage and in Rom. 3.216 have
disappeared with the recognition that the text is not exposition but
pastoral preaching and that it is not a justication account but is
addressed to people whose life problems are involved in the
question of God's righteousness. Rom. 3.216 is not an overcompressed account of the Atonement. The mismatch between
grammar and meaning disappeared when we assumed that Paul
meant what he said, and drew on new historical knowledge to make
sense of the key role of oy! gar e!stin diastolh.
Our teleological reading has passed Test 1.
Test 2 making sense as part of the whole
What is the role of the justication account in the whole meaning
of the text? The problem was not how God can justify sinners, but
how God can be righteous in justifying believing sinners on the
basis of faith without reference to the JewGentile distinction.
Accordingly, justication through faith is not the answer to the
question and the goal of the discussion but the source of the
question and therefore a major presupposition of the discussion.
This explains why readings which assume that Paul was intending
to give a justication account come so close to accounting for the
text but always run up against the problems we noticed. The
justication theology has a role in the meaning of the text as
presupposition. This is parallel to the role of the household
structure as sociological presupposition in the Herbert text we
examined in chapter 4.
Can we see the teleological reading as the rst major step in
Paul's preaching of the gospel to the Romans in their situation? We
concluded that his purpose was to help the Roman believers to
share and live out his view that the gospel demanded mutual
acceptance of Jew and Gentile in Christ.
173
A classic problem with Romans is that if the main theme is taken

to be justication and its consequences, Romans 911 tends to fall
away, while if God's faithfulness is seen to be the primary concern
it is hard to account for Romans 58. Does the discipline of the
teleological reading help us to see a fully coherent whole? We must
do this at the level of the teleological reading.
The rst stage of the preaching is God's action, which has past,
present and future dimensions. Rom. 5.111 is the eschatological
climax of the account of God's action in Rom. 1.165.11. God will
come in judgement. Through Christ and the Spirit, believers live in
the present time of suffering in peace, courage and love, having the
sure hope of nal salvation. The Apostle is taking time for The
Congregation to rest and rejoice in the great certainties of their
faith.
If The Apostle is preaching the gospel to The Congregation as
calling Jew and Gentile to welcome one another in Christ, there are
two major issues outstanding. The Torah as scripture has been
fullled, but what about the Torah as the law of Moses? It seems to
have no place. Why did God give it? What are believers, Jew and
Gentile, to do about it? What about the charge of antinomianism?
Again, what about Israel? If the gospel fulls God's election of
Israel, why is Israel not responding? Is God abandoning Israel? For
the Romans and for Paul, these were not theoretical questions
about God's quality of faithfulness or righteousness, or about
justication. They were difcult, divisive practical issues in the
living out of their response to God's grace in the gospel. They are
taken up as the preaching continues, but they do not simply
determine its content. This is not lecture or apologia, but preaching.
The gospel controls the content; the problems help shape the
preaching because they are important to believers.
Having grappled with God's action, The Apostle deals with life
under the gospel (Rom. 5.128.39), the questions of Israel and the
church (Rom. 9.111.36), and paraenesis (Rom. 12.115.6). Rom.
15.713 is conclusion and climax.
In Rom. 5.128.39, The Apostle deals with the questions about
the Torah. He puts them in the context of God's victory over sin
and death through Christ, and the way believers respond to this in
their living. His aim is to encourage responsible, hopeful obedience
to the gospel in a church which will be able to see the law not as
rejected but as fullled in life in the Spirit. The language of the
powers is suited to dealing with life in Christ as necessarily
174
involving struggle and suffering, with the certain hope of God's

love and victory.
Rom. 5.1221 sets the scene, a battleground on which the victory
has already been won through God's overowing grace in the
human obedience of Christ. The powers gained access to human
life through human will and action (in Adam), and continue to do
so (Rom. 5.12d). Compared with its power as an issue in the
church, the law's role here is small and ambivalent. It shows sin for
what it is, reckonable as transgression, and increases transgression,
with the result that grace abounds more and more. The law slips in
on the Adam side, a power that is overcome. Yet it seems to have a
fth-column role on the Adam side, making sin vulnerable to the
power of God's grace.
Having established this ground, The Apostle proceeds by asking
and answering some major questions. In Rom. 6.17.6 he considers
the accusation and temptation of irresponsibility in life under
grace. He begins with a question that could arise from Rom. 5.20,
`Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?' Rom. 3.78
shows that this represents an accusation against Paul's gospel. It
also represents a temptation, either to be irresponsible or to take
refuge in law. The answer is that the question is nonsensical. Those
who are baptized into Christ died to sin with him in order to share
his life, life lived to God (Rom. 6.210). The Congregation are to
understand themselves accordingly (Rom. 6.11), and yield their
members not to sin but to God (Rom. 6.1213). Rom. 6.14 offers a
secondary basis, the assurance that this is possible because sin will
not rule over them because they are not under law (which operates
ìn Adam', where sin and death rule) but under grace (which rules
ìn Christ'). Rom. 6.1523 examines the nature of believers'
freedom and the choices they face. They have been rescued from
slavery to sin to become slaves of righteousness. Whereas the
former pays the wage of death, the latter offers the gift of life, in
Christ. In Rom. 7.16, The Apostle explains how it is that they, as
believers, are no longer under the law. They have died to it in
Christ in order that they may be Christ's, bearing fruit for God,
slaving in the newness of the Spirit.
The discussion has been turning to the questions of the relationships among sin, law and Spirit. In Rom. 7.78.17, The Apostle
deals with the relationship between sin and law, with the roles of
esh and Spirit. In the process, he offers an explanation of the role
of the law, and disposes of the charge that Paul's gospel rejects it.
175
He takes the worst case rst. Is the law sin? The answer is that the
true nature of the law is not affected by the fact that sin used it to
get a grasp on The Apostle (using himself as representative for all).
It shows up sin for what it is. The next possibility is the suggestion
that the good law brought about death. Rom. 7.1325 considers
who actually is the culprit. The conclusion is that sin takes
advantage of the weakness of the sarj to prevent The Apostle
(representative, again) doing the good law he knows. Rescue is
needed, and it has come from God through Christ. Rom. 7.25 sums
up the situation in which salvation and Spirit are to operate. In
Rom. 8.18, The Apostle explains that God has overcome sin in
the esh through Christ as sin-offering, so that believers might full
the proper requirement of the law as they walk in the Spirit. Rom.
8.911 shows The Congregation that this includes them as the lifegiving Spirit dwells in them, and Rom. 8.1217 shows that they, as
Spirit-led, are freed from the sarj and are heirs of the promise of
salvation.
Rom. 8.1739 deals with the suffering that comes to believers,
both imposed from without and given with the command to be
slaves of righteousness. Suffering is worth while because shot
through with the sure hope of the fullment of God's purpose of
salvation. This parallels the eschatological climax of the rst part of
the preaching, in Rom. 5.111, and moves again to triumphant
assurance.
In Romans 911, The Apostle discusses Israel's failure to
respond to God's fullment through Christ of the call of Abraham.
Again, there is not a simply theoretical discussion, but a real
response to the meaning of this question for the life of the church,
specically the church in Rome. This has two faces, the pain of a
Jewish believer such as Paul, and the temptation for Gentiles who
do not have roots in Israel's history to feel superior. Listening to
the letter, some of them may feel that they stand apart from the
radical overhaul of Jewish identity which the gospel demands.
Especially in Rome, where Jews have come back into a church that
has had some time to grow in relative freedom from the problems
The Apostle has been facing, it may be easy to look down on the
doubts and questionings of Jewish fellow-believers struggling with
them. So The Apostle works out again the way God's faithfulness
is not overcome by Israel's failure.
He evokes his grief for fellow-Jews who are not entering into
their inheritance as God's elect (Rom. 9.15). Working from
176
scripture, he then shows that this is not an indication either of

God's failure or of Israel's displacement. Rather, it will be the
means by which God's election of Israel is fullled in blessing for
the Gentiles and salvation for all Israel.
First he traces the pattern of God's dealings with the seed of
Abraham election was always a matter of God's choosing some
and therefore not others, so that it might indeed be a matter of
grace, not of human deserving (Rom. 9.618). It may be objected
that God should not then nd fault because the human being is
powerless to resist. The Apostle responds negatively by saying that
people may not answer back to God, and then positively by
suggesting that the whole process is part of the mystery of God's
mercy. New people of God are being called from among the
Gentiles and the Israel of the promise is, as scripture suggested,
only a remnant (Rom. 9.1929).
The second step is to show that Israel's present state is the result
of culpable failure to recognize and submit to God's righteousness
as it is revealed in Christ, the goal of the law they have misunderstood. Their scripture shows the rightness of the gospel way, and
the gospel has been proclaimed to them. Their present state is
described already in Isaiah's prophecy (Rom. 9.3010.21).
This raises more explicitly the problem that was evoked but not
allowed to stand in Rom. 9.16: God has not rejected his people,
has he? The Apostle answers this by showing how God answered
Elijah when he asked that question. There is the remnant kept by
grace, and the hardening of the others is in God's purpose (Rom.
11.110). Through Israel's disobedience mercy has come to the
Gentiles, and that mercy should stir Israel to emulation. The story
should also show the Gentile believers that they and their faith
depend on Israel and they also are subject to the kindness and the
severity of God. In relation to their Jewish fellows, The Apostle
calls them not to patience or to charity, but to humility. They, too,
are dependent on mercy and could be cut off because of pride or
unbelief (Rom. 11.1124). The close of the passage is a celebration
of the eschatological mystery. The hardening of Israel was for the
sake of the all-embracing mercy of God, and in the end that will
mean salvation for all Israel (Rom. 11.2532). In the face of the
mystery, adoration is called forth (Rom. 11.336).
In Rom. 12.115.6 The Apostle comes to the specics of
Christian living. Judging by the wealth of paraenesis in the NT
letters, this would have been expected. Again, the needs of the
177
Romans and the pressures of the JewGentile problems shape the

preaching. Picking up earlier emphases, The Apostle exhorts The
Congregation to live in the light of God's mercies (Rom. 12.12)
and the imminent Parousia (Rom. 13.1114), and presents love as
the fullling of the law (Rom. 13.810). While all the ethical
injunctions are appropriate for them, the treatment of attitudes to
civil authorities may have been peculiarly appropriate, since the
emergence of the churches had been accompanied by trouble, and
there is evidence of problems over taxation.2 The paraenetic section
is dominated by discussion of one of the most difcult areas in a life
where Jew and Gentile came together in Christ (Rom. 14.115.6).
What, in actual practice, do you do about food laws and holy days?
The Apostle does not tell The Congregation to eat or refrain,
celebrate or refrain, but offers strong guidance for their handling of
the problems. Believers are to respect one another as servants in
Christ of the same God, not usurping God's judgement but making
room for everybody to act according to conviction. The strong,
having greater freedom, are to accept the weak, and all must
consider others' good. This is grounded in Christ's own action, and
the goal is life in harmony for the glory of God.
On this reading of the letter body, Rom. 15.713 is a lovely
conclusion and climax to the whole. We saw in chapter 7 that such
a reading is in harmony with the letter frame.
There has been an unnoticed assumption in much discussion of
Romans that it must be either an account/preaching of the gospel
or a treatment of a particular problem. Our study has shown the
letter as a preaching of the gospel shaped by the JewGentile
problems. Some parts do not address that issue directly, but are
part of putting it in the gospel perspective and helping hearers to
respond.
Test 3 making historical sense
Is our teleological reading something we can accept that Paul
would have said to the Romans in the situation we identied? Or
does it force us to ask reasonable questions about our understanding of the situation and/or of Paul?
2
J. Friedrich, W. Pohlmann and P. Stuhlmacher, `Zur historischen Situation und
Intention von Romer 13, 17'.
178
At the level of general content, we can accept it. The pastoral

problem and the interpretation of God's action are consistent with
a debate then in progress, as Galatians and Philippians 3 show.
Luke's later account of Paul's meeting with James in Jerusalem
(Acts 21.1724) indicates that the issue was important enough to
become part of the history of the church. It is a good case for Paul
to have put in that situation, and the procedure of going back to
the gospel is characteristic of the Paul we see in the letters. 1 Cor.
1.1831; 8; Gal. 2.164.7; Phil. 2.48; Rom. 14.112 are examples.
It does force us to ask reasonable questions about our understanding of Paul's thought and his pastoral method.
The current debate on dikaiosynh ueoy in Rom. 1.164.25 is
dominated by the assumptions that the term is to be understood
identically throughout Paul's opus and that it refers to the righteousness of the justied, recognizing in some way that this is not
separable from God's own righteousness. Rom. 3.5 is a clear
exception. In the teleological reading, dikaiosynh ueoy refers
throughout to God's own righteousness as it is seen and understood
in God's dealings with people. It does not refer to the righteousness
of the justied. On this basis, we have a teleological reading which
coheres around a question about God's own righteousness.
We noted in chapter 10 that objections against our interpretation
could be raised on the basis of tradition, which we ruled out, or of
Paul's own usage, which we reserved for later examination. While
the subjective genitive reading is not unique,3 it is unusual. We
submit that this does not rule out our teleological reading.
The contexts in which the term is seen to be used differ between
the mainstream and the teleological readings. It is natural for
dikaiosynh ueoy to be understood as `God's righteousness' in a
struggle to resolve a problem about God's righteousness. The new
reading therefore appears as a proper step in understanding in the
light of our current historical knowledge. This usage makes the
term appear as a normal genitive construction rather than as a
(semi-)technical term, so that the reading of the genitive need not
be the same for every occurrence in the Pauline corpus. Would the
others make sense if Paul's usage were consistent in this way? In
Rom. 10.3, y"potassv would be an odd word to use for receiving a
gift, but the idea of submitting to God's righteousness is a
brilliantly succinct description of what, according to Rom. 3.246,
3
e.g. Williams, `The ``Righteousness of God'' in Romans'.
179
is involved in justication through Christ, as well as being appropriate to the immediate context. In 2 Cor. 5.21, Christ was made
something he is not, sin, in order that people might become something they are not, the righteousness of God. The double metaphor
makes good Pauline sense if we take it to mean that in the Cross
God's judgement falls on Christ as one whose being is determined
by the power of sin, and therefore falls on believers as those whose
being is determined by his own just and saving righteousness.
Our reading accounts very satisfactorily for Paul's use of h" e! k
ueoy dikaiosynh in Phil. 3.9 and sofia h"min a!po ueoy, dikaiosynh
ktl. in 1 Cor. 1.30, where he was talking about the righteousness of
the justied.
The question of the relationship between God's own righteousness and the righteousness of the justied belongs to the causal
reading. For now, I have shown that the unusual reading of
dikaiosynh ueoy does not invalidate the teleological reading.
The teleological reading produces a radically new impression of
Paul as pastor and letter-writer. The Paul of mainstream exegesis is
a penetrating thinker, but a poor communicator. We have found a
pastor and preacher who brought a profound understanding of the
gospel to bear on practical questions of life in Christ, who said
what he meant in ways that touched his hearers' experience and
understanding, even actively helped them to change. Can we
account for this difference?
The discipline of the historical-critical method requires that
Paul's texts be taken seriously as letters, and exegetes normally
assert that what they conclude the text means is what they believe
Paul was saying to the Romans. Kasemann's commentary offers a
clear example. He considers that the letter is for a Christian
community which needs a high degree of theological understanding.4 Kasemann's Paul is not writing to the Romans about
their situation, but about the human condition. He is expecting
them to recognize their situation as a particular manifestation of it.
Thus, in Rom. 3.19 the Jew becomes the exemplar of the pious
person.5 He is the example chosen because he is culturally relevant,
but the point at issue is his mistaken piety, not his Jewishness.
Further, Kasemann's Paul expects from the Romans a high
degree of analytical skill. They would have to exercise this at
4
5

Ibid., 87.
180
lightning speed as the text was read to them. For instance, they
would need to identify the presupposition which makes sense of a
radical and otherwise disjointed shift in the argument at Rom. 3.4:
This can only mean that the covenant violated by the
people is still maintained from God's side. Now the argument does not continue . . . in such a way that Christ has
become a servant of the circumcision to conrm the
promises made to the fathers and thereby to conrm God's
covenant faithfulness to Israel. In a most remarkable way
the problem is extended to every human being and to
God's trial with the whole world. This makes sense only if
the faithfulness of God to Israel is a special instance of his
faithfulness to all creation.6
The justication account that Kasemann's Paul sends to the church
at Rome would be suitable for a high-level theological seminar or,
better still, a learned journal. Of course a commentary must explain
much that would be obvious to rst-century believers, and the
material necessarily seems more difcult to us than it would to
them. Of course the Romans would be expected to reread the letter,
think and talk about it. Nevertheless, it is a letter, and if Paul was
even minimally competent as communicator, listeners should have
been able to follow through at a rst hearing, even if details and
implications might be missed. If Kasemann is right, this letter
demands that they identify unstated connections and presuppositions at high speed, and think at the level of abstraction involved in
seeing the Jew as the pious person rather than themselves or the
Jews listening with them in a situation where Jewishness was an
issue. Such a capacity for abstract thinking normally exists only in
a tiny fraction of a population. Where would one nd such a
congregation today? If the Romans were so different from most
modern congregations, what made the difference? Or was Paul
after all an insensitive and unsuccessful communicator through
whom the Spirit nevertheless founded all those churches?
Of course, not all commentators nd Paul's text as opaque as
Kasemann does. Nevertheless, exegeses within the justicationaccount framework virtually all show Paul giving a lecture about
the human condition and expecting the Romans to think of the
6
Ibid., 812, my italics.
181
agonizing problems of their church life as examples of it, not as

issues in their own right.
Our teleological reading would make great demands on the
Roman listeners because it brings out and challenges presuppositions which might not have been noticed, even. On the other hand,
it treats them directly and concretely. It deals with real Jews and
real Gentiles. It takes up live issues. The speaker's skills and
opportunities are used to engage and help hearers. If Paul was
presenting that, he could reasonably expect to be understood.
How is this new Paul revealed? We separated the tasks of understanding the text as something Paul wanted to say and understanding it as expression of his thought. To understand a letter as
communication, the exegete must concentrate on this one text,
without referring constantly to the whole corpus, and must give
priority to understanding it as address. In doing these things, we
asked radical questions about the nature of the text, and thereby
formed a new view of the kind of thing we are reading. In other
words, when we read the text as communication, we found that
Paul was a very effective communicator. Given his record as a
successful missionary, this view of him has much greater historical
probability than the traditional one. We can now see that the
traditional one is a function of exegetical interest in Paul's thought
at the expense of his communication.
This is not to say that mainstream exegetes are wrong. We do not
wish to discard the variety of rich encounters with the text, but to
point out the distortion imposed on our picture of Paul by singlestrand exegesis on the basis of the one question, What does this text
mean?
Test result
The teleological reading has passed our tests, so we can now use it
as a framework for the causal reading and offer it to the debate as
our best answer to the question, What was Paul intending the
Romans to hear when this passage was read to them?
12
T H E C A U S A L E X P O S I T I O N OF R O M A N S
1 . 1 6 4. 2 5
In this book we are developing a new kind of historical-critical

reading of Rom. 1.164.25. In the teleological reading developed
and tested in chapters 611 we made sense of the text in terms of
Paul's purpose in creating it. We gave our best answer to the
question, `Where was it going to?' Since it is part of a letter, we had
to read it as coherent communication. In this chapter, we complete
our exegesis with the causal reading. Our aim is to make sense of
the text in terms of Paul's thought from which it arose. This time
our question is, `Where was it coming from?' We need to read it as
arising from a coherent pattern of thinking.1
We seek access to this pattern of thinking by examining theological presuppositions which are visible in the text. In chapter 4, we
saw that the extract from The Country Parson is Herbert's account
of the way the Parson rules his household. There is a visible
sociological presupposition, the household structure. Rom. 6.111
is Paul's explanation of why believers cannot sin that grace may
abound. There are visible presuppositions the nature of baptism,
the concepts of being in Christ and living to God. Rom. 1.164.25
is Paul's preaching about how God is righteous in justifying
believers. Now we look at two visible presuppositions, the theology
of justication and the Creatorcreature relationship.
These are signicant patterns in Paul's thought. In this causal
exposition, we shall examine them, their interrelations, and the
interactions between them and what Paul was intending to say.
This will deepen our understanding. It will also enable us to show
how Paul's preaching is generated partly by the presuppositions
and how the form in which the presuppositions appear in the text is
controlled by what he was intending to say. Because causal exposition is concerned with the thinking from which the preaching arose,
1
On making sense of a text, see pp. 423.
182
183
it involves reading this text in the context of the Pauline corpus.

This is in contrast to the teleological exposition, where we must
restrict our attention to the text in hand. Here we are disappointed.
Our study makes Romans look so different from the letter we
thought we knew that we are forced to ask whether the other letters
might also look different. We shall therefore draw on material
outside our text only where we can be reasonably condent that we
are dealing with very characteristic patterns of thought or action.
The causal exposition of a text provides contributions to studies of
the writer's thought. Our contributions will be limited by our
limited access to the wider corpus. This has the very serious
disadvantage that it will not be possible to include in this book an
example of a full causal exposition, but it has the advantage of
disciplining us to the text we are reading, which is the focus.
As with the teleological reading, we shall be working alongside
the mainstream debate, not within it. We are asking questions in a
different framework, and direct engagement with the debate would
pull us into its familiar framework and away from our unfamiliar
task, thus distorting the causal reading.
For our causal reading, we have some parameters already set.
The rst is provided by the teleological reading. In chapters 34 we
saw that a text is generated partly by patterns of thought in the
author's mind and partly by her intention, what she wants to
communicate. The author will not describe the generating patterns,
but they will be visible in the text to some extent. They control its
content to a signicant extent and its form to some extent. On the
other hand, the extent to which and the form in which they are
visible in the text is controlled by the author's intended communication. The teleological reading has elucidated Paul's intended
communication. This frees us to concentrate here on the thought
patterns, the theological presuppositions. It also shows us what
communication was shaping the forms in which we nd them. We
know now that we are reading pastoral preaching, not an exposition of ideas. This means that we shall not expect to nd straightforward accounts of the presuppositions. Our knowledge of the
nature and detail of the intended communication will help us to
understand them.
The other pre-set parameters arise from ourselves as readers. We
come to the text as heirs of a rich tradition of interpretation, and
this affects our perception. Specically, we are bringing from
chapter 2 our question about the role of the justication ideas in
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the text. Coming from a debate in which it was assumed that Paul
was giving a didactic or polemical account of justication by grace
through faith, we are turning to a new task. We are seeing the text
not as exposition but as pastoral preaching. We are not trying to
understand the justication account as what Paul was intending to
say, but trying to understand its role in what Paul was intending to
preach about God's own righteousness and its implications for
believers. We hope to clarify our understanding of the theology and
deepen our understanding of the text by doing so.
How have we moved from the former to the new perception of
the text?
First, we made it possible by examining ourselves as readers and
clarifying what it is that we want to know. This helped us to
develop the technique of separating our major interests, dealing
with Paul's intention and communication in the teleological
reading and with his thought in the causal reading. That allowed us
to divide the load of detailed work and to sharpen our questions, so
that Paul's preaching came clear for us. Our examination of the
nature of the text and the techniques of the teleological reading
contributed signicantly.
Further, in chapter 4 we took account of the fact that texts
contain more than authors intend to communicate, and identied
factors which draw readers' attention to other elements of meaning.
Cultural distance from the text can mean that later readers'
attention is attracted to elements of meaning that were secondary
or submerged for the addressees. Later readers may bring to the
text questions other than those it was created to answer. We noted
that for biblical texts the long history of intensive study makes
these factors particularly potent. We can now see how they have
operated in traditional justication readings of Rom. 1.164.25.
How were they operating in that case? If our teleological reading
is an element of meaning genuinely contained in the text, why has it
not been discovered before? In chapter 3, we identied some
general cultural and scholarly factors helping to direct attention to
the secondary element of meaning: exegetes' concern with Paul's
thought rather than his communication, the preference for causal
over teleological explanation in our culture, and the misleading
identication of the text as exposition. We can now add the
particular factor that the question of God's faithfulness and righteousness so important to the church of the fties quickly became a
dead issue. By the second century, there were already different
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questions about JewishChristian relations, as the term `Christian'

shows. Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho is a clear example.
This meant that Paul's question was not being asked, so his answer
was not noticed.2 It has been possible to recover it only by
stringently disciplined detective work in the context of recent
studies of the emergence of Christianity from its Jewish matrix.
On the other hand, for virtually the whole history of historicalcritical exegesis in Western biblical scholarship the passage has
been read as if Paul were dealing with the question of how sinners
can be acceptable to a righteous God. I am arguing that this has
directed attention not away from the text but away from the
element of meaning that represents Paul's intended communication.
This has been possible because the theological presupposition of
the preaching provides a valid Pauline answer to the later question.
That is why the justication reading with all its variations has
been so durable. It relates to an element of meaning that is close to
the surface of the text, and thus comes close to accounting for all of
the text. It does not offer a perfect t, and we have seen in chapters
2 and 6 that some of the failures are critical. The fact that exegetical
attention has been focussed on Paul's thought to the exclusion of
any effective concern with his communication helps to account for
the lack of any felt need to look beyond the justication framework. This arose only recently, because study of the Torah in rstcentury Judaism forced some of the points of mist into uncomfortable prominence.
The justication theology as presupposition
We begin the causal exposition, our effort to trace in the text some
of the theology from which it sprang, by considering justication.
In chapter 2, we proposed that we should test an hypothesis that
in Rom. 1.164.25 Paul was doing something other than giving the
Romans a justication account, but that justication was important
for what he was trying to do. In chapters 34, we examined the
workings of both texts and exegetes to develop the teleological plus
causal approach to historical-critical exegesis. This provided a
more specic hypothesis: that the justication thinking might be a
presupposition of what Paul was intending to say, present in the
2
cf. Beker, Paul the Apostle, 75 on the early loss of understanding of Paul's letters
in their own situation.
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text as a by-product of his intended address to the Romans. The

teleological reading has given us our view of what Paul was
intending to do. He was intending to remove a barrier to proper
JewGentile relationships in the church by helping believers to
recognize that God was indeed righteous in justifying believing
sinners without reference to their membership in elect Israel. In
doing this, he discussed the status of Jewish and Gentile sinners and
rehearsed the `How' of God's justifying action for the sake of
explaining the `Why'.
Whether it is identied as a presentation of the doctrine of
justication or as an account of the gospel in justication terms, the
good news in Rom. 1.164.25 is normally seen to be that God
justies believing sinners by grace through faith. The foil to this is
that human beings cannot justify themselves by doing what God
requires. All have sinned; all need grace; God gives gracious
justication to all who believe. There is no other requirement. Here,
we shall call this pattern of thought Paul's justication theology.
Our causal exposition will help us to check whether this particular
formulation reects accurately the traces of the theology which we
nd in the text.
We notice immediately that the statement of the justication
theology is a statement in universal terms of the problem that
brought the text into being. Paul's solution to the problem of
whether Gentiles who became believers had to become Jews was a
conclusion from God's action in the Cross. God's action was
justication of all who believed, therefore belief alone was the
human response required. When that view was put into practice, it
caused practical problems about how Jew and Gentile could live
together in Christ, and the theological problem of how God could
be righteous if he acted in a way that seemed tantamount to
abandoning the election of Israel. At both levels, the problem
focussed on the Torah as instrument of election. The Torah, the
nomoq, enters into the meaning of the text not as an element of the
justication theology, but as an element of the situation in which it
was being put into practice.
In sharp contrast, readings in the mainstream debate see gracious
justication not as the problem but as the solution. Why? The text
offered the answer to Luther's agonized sense of being unable ever
to satisfy the righteous demands of the righteousness of God. The
answer he found in Rom. 1.17 is that God gives the righteousness
he demands. The gift is received by believing, not deserving. One
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becomes righteous in God's sight not by achieving righteousness

through effort (works, works of the law) but by receiving it through
faith.3
We may schematize this reversal:
(1)
God's gracious justication of believing sinners is the

source of the problem Paul was discussing as he created the
text: How can God be righteous in our eyes [his and the
Romans', believers of his time] if he justies believing
sinners simply on the basis of their believing, without
reference to the JewGentile distinction that he created in
electing Israel?
(2)
God's gracious justication of believing sinners is the

solution to the problem that exegesis following Luther
brings to the text Paul created: How can we [human beings]
be righteous in God's eyes, since we are not able to create
that righteousness by our own efforts?
We can formulate the reversal in another illuminating way. The

element of the justication theology that poses the problem
changes.
(1)
In Luther's situation, sin is the problem and it draws a

great deal of theological attention.
(2)
In Paul's situation, grace is the problem, and sin is a

background datum. The theological attention sin draws is
focussed on the double question of God's judgement and
Jewish believers' self-understanding.
Luther is not to be held responsible for all the exegetical developments that owed from his work, but the contrast we have
delineated is central to the argument of this chapter. For brevity,
we shall refer to this stream of exegesis as the Luther tradition.
This shift in emphasis changes the theological and the anthropological problems. In exegesis in the Luther tradition, the driving
problem is anthropological, the problem of how human beings as
human beings can be acceptable to God. The JewGentile distinction is a cultural factor dening the detail of that question. God's
grace is the solution to the human problem, but it can be seen to
generate a problem about God's righteousness. How could God be
3
Preface to the Wittenberg edition of his Latin writings, 3367.
188
God if he justied believing sinners without dealing with their sin?

That would be calling black white, and God would cease to be
God. Atonement through the Cross answers that problem. In the
letter situation, the driving question is about God's righteousness,
since Paul's proclamation of grace seems to carry the implication
that God must fail in righteousness as faithfulness to the covenant.
The problem about God's righteousness is central, not secondary,
and it is a different ethical question. Here, the anthropological
problem is not how human beings can be acceptable to God that
has already been solved but how Jew and Gentile are related to
one another under God's unconditional grace.
Our rst answer, then, to the question of the way the justication
theology functions as theological presupposition of Paul's
preaching in Rom. 1.164.25 is that it lies outside the text as the
problem that generated it. The difference between Paul's and the
Luther tradition's problems makes us ask whether further exploration may force us to modify the formulation of the justication
theology with which we began.
There is a second-level answer to our question. The justication
theology also functions as presupposition in the preaching. In
exploring this, we shall be beginning to deal with our question,
What is the form in which the justication theology appears as
presupposition in the text?
In chapter 4, we saw that in Rom. 6.111 two interconnected
elements of meaning are clearly visible. Rom. 6.311 contains the
fullest discussion of baptism in the extant letters. It is there because
Paul was drawing on the Romans' understanding and experience of
baptism to show them why believers cannot continue in sin so that
grace may abound. In Rom. 3.216, also, he was drawing on a
known idea and experience in dealing with the point at issue.
Two elements of the justication theology appear in Rom.
3.234a, sin and gracious justication: panteq gar h%marton kai
y"steroyntai thq dojhq toy ueoy dikaioymenoi dvrean tC h ay!toy
xariti. In Paul's preaching, this is the ground for oy! gar e!stin
diastolh in Rom. 3.22d. That is, it is not something that has to be
proved, but a datum from which something else can be proved. Oy!
gar e!stin diastolh is critical, because it is the ground of ei! q pantaq
toyq pisteyontaq in Rom. 3.22c, and that is the point towards which
Paul has been driving. God's righteousness, manifest and effective
through faith in Jesus Christ, is effective for all who believe, not for
Jews who believe and for Gentiles who believe and become Jews.
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Paul's rst step in showing this was to point to the church's

experience. All have sinned; all are being justied freely by God's
grace. The panteq clause, universal in form, is true of all believers,
and the statement is being made to point out to the conservative
Jewish believer that Jewish believers are no different from others.
In Rom. 3.216, the other element of the justication theology,
faith, is separated from this statement. It appears as the means by
which grace becomes effective for the believers. Faith to some
extent denes grace, by stressing its character of gratuity and by
showing how the i" lasthrion is brought to bear on sin. There is no
possibility here of any suggestion that the faith justies the believer.
Its instrumental character appears clearly in the long chain between
grace and faith: tC h ay!toy xariti dia thq a!polytrvsevq thq e!n
XristCv ! Ihsoy. o% n proeueto o" ueoq i" lasthrion dia thq pistevq.
In Paul's preaching, faith was central to the driving problem, the
problem of whether faith alone or faith plus conversion to Judaism
was necessary for the nal justication of the Gentile believer. It
was essential but not central to the understanding of God's action
that supplied the answer. The centre was God's grace in the Cross.
The point of Rom. 3.216 was that justication of sinners by
grace through faith is the activity and the demonstration of God's
righteousness, not a theological error that impugns God's righteousness. The church's experience that believers were sinners
justied by God's grace was interpreted to help make that point. So
far, the justication theology as explicit presupposition appears as
a statement about believers consonant with believers' experience
and with the preaching of the gospel. It is not a statement about
sin, grace and faith as theological concepts or universal realities.
In Rom. 1.183.20, the sin of the people under discussion is a
datum from which Paul made his case about Jew being in the same
position as Gentile before God's righteous judgement. Again, it
functions as a presupposition because the believers' experience
cohered with the gospel as it was proclaimed.
In Rom. 1.183.26, elements of the justication theology function as direct presuppositions of some of the discussion. In Rom.
1.1617 and Rom. 3.274.25, it is a more distant presupposition.
The single claim of Rom. 1.1617 is that salvation through the
gospel is indeed for all who believe because God's righteousness is
revealed in it in a sphere of faith. God's new action fulls the word
of Israel's prophet, and includes Israel's election. The justication
theology lies behind this as the interpretation of God's action that
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leads to the claim. Accordingly, establishing the claim involves

some indirect spelling out of the theology.
In Rom. 3.274.25, God's former action with Israel, in the call of
Abraham and the gift of the Torah, is viewed through the lens of
God's new action, in Christ. Once this light is cast on it, it becomes
clear that God's purpose in the election of Israel was something
that can be described in terms of the justication theology.
This discussion seems to come close to saying that the justication theology is both presupposition and conclusion of the
preaching in Rom. 1.164.25. Did Paul, then, beg the question? He
did not. His justication theology was the problem that gave rise to
this particular preaching of the gospel. He was demonstrating that
the problem was not a problem at all, but life-shaping divine truth.
The critical question is, A problem for whom? The unconditional
grace that broke the bounds of Israel was a problem for some of
the existing servants of this God. The process of the preaching was
to refocus the problem, facing up to the way their self-understanding, their lifestyle and even their God were called into
question, and showing this as a proper and fruitful process. Such a
process does not end until the whole of the letter is being lived out.
Having looked at the way elements of the justication theology
function as presupposition of the preaching, we can now formulate
a more general answer to our question, What is the form in which
this presupposition appears in the text which arose, in part, from it?
On the evidence so far, we can say that Paul's presupposition was
that all of the people to whom and about whom he was talking
were sinners justied by God's grace on the basis of their believing
in Christ. The people to whom he was talking were the Roman
believers. What denition can we offer of the category of people
about whom he was talking? We can safely say that he was talking
about the believers of his time. He himself is included in what The
Apostle is saying to The Conservative. His greeting and thanksgiving establish the Romans as part of the whole church, and the
statement of what God was doing in Christ (Rom. 3.235a) is
clearly about the way God deals with believing sinners, whoever
they may be.
Key terms and underlying events
We can deepen our understanding of key terms in this passage, and
thus of Paul's thinking as it underpins the preaching, by exploring
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another feature of the text. It is an interpretation of a series of

events. By adding that deeper understanding to what we have
already learnt, we shall put ourselves in a position to consider
whether the statement of the justication theology with which we
began, a philosophical-dogmatic statement about all human beings,
is a fair statement of Paul's theology of justication as we can
discover it in this passage.
The key terms as we discuss them in exegesis and theology are
sin, justication, righteousness, grace, faith. They are represented
in the text by a"martia, a"martanv, a"martvloq and some of the uses
of verbs like prassv (e.g. in Rom. 2.12); dikaiosynh, dikaioq,
dikaiov, dikaivsiq; xariq; pisteyv, pistiq. Again, we are limited
to what we can learn from this passage, so that our results will not
be full studies of Paul's concepts, but contributions to such studies.
We saw in chapter 11, however, that Paul's account of God's action
continues to Rom. 5.11. We must take account of the event element
of Rom. 5.111 to avoid distorting our understanding of the
events. It provides the eschatological conclusion to the sequence.
The central event is the crucixion of Jesus of Nazareth. It
appears in the text as a happening already interpreted. The crucied
Jesus is Jesus Christ whom God put forth as a means of dealing
with sin through faith, by his blood, a means of salvation by
redemption. As this event is preached as God's saving action
(dynamiq . . . ueoy . . . ei! q svthrian, Rom. 1.16) human beings
encounter God's nal judgement, brought forward into history.
The event preached is revelation of God's own righteousness, and
as such (gar, Rom. 1.17a) the judgement is power for salvation for
everyone who believes.
As far as this text is concerned, the interpreted happening is a
datum. The question of how it came to be so interpreted therefore
lies outside our discussion. We simply note that the preaching of
the Cross presupposes both the Resurrection and the recognition of
these events as God's saving action (as in Rom. 4.25). There is no
good news in the veriable fact that a man called Jesus was
crucied. For the purposes of Paul's theology, events are happenings that have been understood, and the gospel events are understood as action of the God of Israel. That is how God revealed his
righteousness.
The judgement of the Cross is a judgement which is at once
condemnation and salvation. The sinner who by believing the
gospel is brought under that double judgement is saved from one
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state into another. The state from which the believer is saved is
described with the phrases y"f ' a"martian (Rom. 3.9) and y"podikoq
. . . tCv ueCv (Rom. 3.19b), the latter describing the consequence of
the former (cf. Rom. 1.32). The state into which the believer is
saved is described with the phrase dikaioq e!k pistevq (Rom.
1.17). In Rom. 5.111 we see dikaivuenteq . . . e!k pistevq (Rom.
5.1), and the certain hope contained in pollCv . . . mallon dikaivuenteq nyn e!n tCv ai% mati ay!toy svuhsomeua di' ay!toy a!po thq
o!rghq (Rom. 5.9). The state of salvation into which the believer is
brought thus appears as denitive but not nal. That is, God's
judgement through the preached Cross decides the believer's
destiny, but there is still the eschatological judgement to come.
The events obviously involved in this account are the crucixion,
the preaching, the believer's hearing and believing, and the
eschatological judgement, an event that is still to happen but is
certain.
What can we learn from Rom. 1.164.25 about what Paul
understood that it means to be a sinner? Our best starting point is
the term doja. It appears as follows:
Rom. 1.213
dioti gnonteq ton ueon oy!x v"q ueon e! dojasan h$ hy!xaristhsan, a!ll' e!mataivuhsan . . . faskonteq ei(nai sofoi
e!mvranuhsan kai hllajan thn dojan toy a!fuartoy ueoy
e!n o"moivmati ei! konoq fuartoy a!nurvpoy kai peteinvn
kai tetrapodvn kai e"rpetvn.
Rom. 2.610
o^q a!podvsei e"kastCv kata ta erga ay!toy. toiq men kau'
y"pomonhn ergoy a!gauoy dojan kai timhn kai a!fuarsian
zhtoysin zvhn ai! vnion . . . doja de kai timh kai ei! rhnh
panti tCv e!rgazomenCv to a!gauon . . .
Rom. 3.7
ei! de h" a!lhueia toy ueoy e!n tCv e!mCv ceysmati e!perisseysen ei! q thn dojan ay!toy, ti eti ka!gv v"q a"martvloq
krinomai;
Rom. 3.234a
panteq gar h%marton kai y"steroyntai thq dojhq toy ueoy
dikaioymenoi dvrean . . .
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Rom. 4.20
ei! q de thn e!paggelian toy ueoy oy! diekriuh tC h a!pistiCa
a!ll' e!nedynamvuh tC h pistei, doyq dojan tCv ueCv . . .
In Rom. 5.111, Rom. 5.2
kayxvmeua e!p' e!lpidi thq dojhq toy ueoy.
Basically, there is some lack in relation to doja in connection with
sin, and some restoration in connection with believing and being
justied. Study of the doja language shows that the events of the
passage are events in Paul's story of the relationship between the
Creator and humanity as creatures of the Creator. This relationship
denes the terms. Two strong verbal clues start our study. The
people who by their wickedness suppress the truth do it by not
glorifying or thanking God even though they know God (Rom.
1.18, 21). Abraham's growing strong in faith and trusting God
involves or even is giving glory to God. That is why faith was
reckoned to him for righteousness (Rom. 4.202). The second clue
is the reminder of Adam in the doja statements of Rom. 1.23; 3.23.
In later developments of the Genesis stories, Adam at the Fall lost
the glory of God which had been reected in his face.4 With
justication is given the hope of the glory of God (Rom. 5.2). These
clues together suggest that the sin of which the sinners are guilty
and which holds them in bondage is the sin of Adam. It involves
the breaking of a relationship which may be partially described
with the phrase `giving glory to God'. Salvation would then consist
in the re-establishing of this relationship, so that God is given glory
and the believer is given the certain hope of the glory of God. We
begin our exploration of this idea by examining the echoes of
earlier tradition in Rom. 1.1832.
As we saw in chapter 10, this is not an argument by allusion.
Nevertheless, a number of scholars have noticed numerous echoes
of the Wisdom of Solomon, especially chapters 1314, and of the
Fall story.
There are very strong resemblances in both language and content
to Wisdom 1314. Closer examination shows, however, that we are
not in Wisdom's thought world. The arguments about the knowledge of God are radically different. In Wisdom, the evidence is
there in creation and people should deduce the Creator. In
Romans, God is known but denied recognition. In both cases,
idolatry follows. In Romans, it is an inevitable exchange for the
4
Gen Rab XI.2, XII.6; Apoc. Mos., esp. chs. xx, xxi.
194
worship denied the Creator, and idols are seen as a poor exchange,
mere images of things God created. In Wisdom, idolatry arises in
the hiatus resulting from failure to deduce God, and the idols are
seen as the worthless and powerless work of the worshippers' own
hands. In both cases, evil and social disruption follow. In Wisdom,
they are caused by idolatry; in Romans, paredvken ay!toyq o" ueoq
shows them as God's punishment. The Romans account is far more
strongly relational.
At the verbal level, the Genesis echoes are slighter than the
Wisdom ones. In the context of the presentation of God as Creator,
the language of Rom. 1.23 is strongly reminiscent of Gen. 1.206
(LXX), where God creates tetrapoda, e"rpeta, and peteina, and
also creates anurvpon kat' ei! kona h"meteran kai kau' o"moivsin.
Further, the wilful exchange of glory and its consequences reminds
us of the Fall. Closer examination of the structure and sequence of
events reveals that we are in the world of the Fall story. We are
dealing with different literary forms. The myth of Creation and Fall
is story; the preaching in Rom. 1.1832 can be analysed as
argument. Nevertheless, both speak of a series of things that
happened in a chain of cause and effect.
The human being is related to God by an initiative of the Creator
requiring an appropriate creaturely response. In Genesis, the
initiative is the command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil; the appropriate response is to obey. In Romans,
the initiative is God's gift of the knowledge of God; the appropriate
response is to give glory and thanks. In each case, the creaturely
response is refused, in Genesis by eating the fruit, in Romans by
not giving glory and thanks. In the act of refusal, the human beings
damage their own being. Adam and Eve recognize and are ashamed
of their nakedness, and they hide from God. The rebels of Romans
1 become futile and foolish, with darkened minds. So far, refusal of
the creaturely response carries with it its own punishment. In
addition, God punishes the sin. The curses on Adam and Eve bring
trouble into life, and their banishment from the Garden is separation from the tree of life. In Romans, God gives the sinners up to
what they have made of themselves. In both cases, the outcome is
widening circles of sin and the disruption of human community
(Gen. 4.2b16; 6.15; 11.19; Rom. 1.2432).
The shared creation setting and the parallel sequence of signicant events strongly suggest that the a!sebeia and a!dikia of Rom.
1.18 are the sin of Adam. Supporting this argument are the general
195
observations that human beings appear to suffer as heirs or bearers

of the sin of Adam in Rom. 5.1214 and 1 Cor. 15.21, 22, and that
the future hope of Rom. 8.1922 has elements of reversal of the
Fall. More particularly, it explains why panteq . . . h%marton in
Rom. 3.23 is underlined with a reference to lacking the glory of
God.
There are differences between the Genesis and the Romans
stories. The most important is that there are God-given signs of
hope in Genesis, the acts of God's mercy. Adam and Eve are given
proper garments, Cain is given a protective mark, the beginnings of
a new world are saved out of the ood, and the call of Abraham is
the promise of a new unity after the scattering of the sinners of
Babel. In the pronouncement of the righteous wrath of God on
sinners, there are no signs of hope. Hope now lies outside human
history, in God's new action in Christ.
This examination suggests that Paul understood sin as turning
away from the relationship of dependence and gratitude towards
God for which humanity is created. This affects the human being,
now not able to function properly, and God, now not acknowledged as God and therefore not allowed to be God in relation to
the creature. Ùf ' a"martian in Rom. 3.9 shows this as a condition
of life, not simply the nature of particular actions.
We can now comment on two particular questions.
In the teleological reading, we noticed a logical gap in the
argument of Rom. 1.1921. Apparently, there was a natural
theology argument that people should have deduced God from
God's self-revelation in creation, but their sin was described as
refusing the knowledge of God that they had. We can now see that
the knowledge of God mentioned in Rom. 1.19, 21 is the relationship of dependence and gratitude given with creation.5 This would
explain the e!n of Rom. 1.19. Then the rest of creation bears
supporting witness to the Creator (Rom. 1.20). The gar of Rom.
1.20, however, seems to be part of a logical sequence, so we still feel
a logical gap. This is at least partly because we live in a world where
atheism as belief that God does not exist is a widely accepted
option. In a world where the nature of the divine rather than the
existence of the divine was open for widespread disagreement, it is
easier to see how Paul and the Romans could feel no problem.
5
This text has generated much discussion. My interpretation is close to those of
Hooker (Àdam in Romans 1', 299), Kasemann (Commentary on Romans, 412) and
Ziesler (Romans, 77).
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We have moved a long way from the older formulation of the

problem of sin in Rom. 1.163.26 as the inability to establish one's
own righteousness by doing what God requires. For Paul, sin does
not consist in failure to keep the law. Rather, that failure shows the
underlying problem. This is consistent with the role of the law in
the teleological reading as a measuring stick.
How did Paul see God's action in the Cross dealing with sin, the
broken relationship and consequent darkened minds and deant
deeds? Looking at the events, we see that here `grace', `faith',
`righteousness' and `justication' come into play. The broken
relationship does not leave the sinner loose in the cosmos, but in
bondage. This is represented most explicitly in the text by paredvken ay!toyq o" ueoq (Rom. 1.248) and y"f ' a"martian (Rom.
3.9b). It is pictured in Rom. 1.21b23. God deals with this situation
by an act of redemption a!polytrvsiq (Rom 3.24b). The believer
is rescued from bondage back into relationship with God. This
relationship is created by the means of redemption, [Xristoq
! Ihsoyq] . . . i" lasthrion dia thq pistevq (Rom. 3.25a). Christ is
i" lasthrion by his sacricial death (e!n tCv ay!toy ai% mati, Rom.
3.25a). In that action, God creates a relationship of faith responding to grace. He makes a righteous person of the sinner, and
gives the sinner justication, the verdict Dikaioq.
What did Paul understand was involved in God justifying and
human beings being justied? This question is framed to correspond with Paul's discourse. Although he had the noun dikaivsiq
at his disposal, he usually used the verb. This ts the fact that he
was preaching about happenings. There are active forms of dikaiov
with God as subject in Rom. 3.26, 30; 4.5, and passive forms with
people being, or not being, justied in Rom. 2.13; 3.20, 24, 28; 4.2.
(In Rom. 3.4, God is to be justied. This is recognition of a
righteousness that exists, not one that must rst be created.)
In the judgement context, dikaiov is a juridical term. It refers in
this preaching to the giving of the verdict Dikaioq. What is involved
in giving and receiving that verdict through the Cross? First,
sinners are justied. This contravenes the standard of righteousness
for judges in Israel, but that is no problem in this preaching. God
justies believing sinners, and the question was not whether but on
what terms God is righteous in doing so, with reference to the
covenant with Israel. The believing sinner who is justied through
accepting a i" lasthrion is receiving and acknowledging God's
judgement on him as sinner, Ajioq uanatoy (Rom. 1.32a). The fact
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that that verdict comes not as a pronouncement but in the form of

a i" lasthrion means that the guilt and power of sin are overcome,
as we observed in chapter 10. Further, the person who accepts a
i" lasthrion is coming to God the judge as a believer, that is, in the
creaturely attitude of dependence and trust. Thus, the judgement
itself creates the relationship of human faith responding to God's
grace. It does this by virtue of its nature it is a i" lasthrion dia thq
pistevq. (The placement of the two participial phrases with
i" lasthrion is a syntactic oddity. Since both are anarthrous, one
would expect to take them with the verb, but they are placed with
and conceptually related to i" lasthrion. Christ's death happened
and is i" lasthrion because of God's purpose and action, so
proeueto and i" lasthrion in Rom. 3.25a are themselves very
closely linked.)
The relationship of human faith responding to God's grace is a
relationship created by God's initiative which requires an appropriate creaturely response. This is the pattern of the Fall story
(God's initiative in a command, with the response of obedience)
and of Rom. 1.1921 (God's initiative in giving knowledge of God,
with the response of giving glory and thanks). In Romans 4, Paul
showed that God's intention in the call of Abraham was that Jew
and Gentile should be related to God by faith. Again we see God's
initiative and the appropriate human response. Abraham's faith is
response to God's grace the promise (Rom. 4.3; Gen. 15.5; Rom.
4.1821), ton dikaioynta ton a!sebh (Rom. 4.5). The promise is
necessarily a matter of grace (Rom. 4.16). In his gracious action,
God appears as Creator, and he is so described in Rom. 4.17b.
Abraham's faith as response to the grace of the promise epitomizes
the dependence and trust proper to the creature: par' e!lpida e!p'
e!lpidi e!pisteysen (Rom. 4.18a). He believes that God can
perform the promise even when human resources are dead (Rom.
4.19) and an act of creation is needed, giving life to the dead and
calling into being things that are not. With this faith Abraham
gives glory to God. This brings us back to the relationship between
creature and Creator in Rom. 1.1921, and this time the relationship is complete.
Thus, through the Cross God provides a i" lasthrion dia thq
pistevq that redeems from bondage to sin. It does this by dealing
with the guilt and power of sin and in the process creating the
relationship of human faith responding to God's grace. God
creates the proper righteousness of the creature, and vindicates his
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own righteousness. God is acknowledged as God, and this establishment of the Creator's right and power is necessary to the very
existence of the creature's righteousness. The human creature is free
from bondage to sin only when God is given glory and thanks, that
is, treated as God. Accordingly, any one of those described as
dikaivuenteq (Rom. 5.1) can also be described as o" dikaioq (Rom.
1.17).
We can now see why Paul would not have any requirement
added to faith for membership in the church. The relationship
created by justication through a i" lasthrion dia thq pistevq
would be destroyed.
We can also see two reasons why the expiation/propitiation/
Mercy Seat debate over i" lasthrion is so inconclusive. First, the
text is not an Atonement account, even an over-compressed one.
For Paul's concern here, the Atonement is a datum, and whatever
debate there had been or was about it in the church at the time is
not under consideration. Second, our Atonement account debate
presupposes that this passage is dealing with a contrast between
God's saving righteousness and God's condemning wrath, but the
teleological reading does not show this contrast. We have seen that
the i" lasthrion makes righteous people out of sinners, partly by
virtue of the fact that it is itself the judgement of condemnation. As
far as the believing sinner is concerned it does not avert the wrath,
but transforms it.
This brings us to Paul's terms xariq and pistiq/pisteyv. Xariq
is God's. Besides God's dealings with Abraham, it is represented in
this passage by the action described in Rom. 3.246, and by the gift
the sinners rejected, knowledge of God (Rom. 1.1921). The utter
gratuity of grace, its creative power and disturbing character are
underlined by the description of God in Rom. 4.5, ton dikaioynta
ton a!sebh.
In the teleological reading, we found that in Rom. 1.164.25
pistiq refers to believing in Christ, since that was the disputed
point for the people to whom Paul was preaching. Correspondingly, the functioning of the noun pistiq in this passage is usually
controlled by the verb pisteyv. Rom. 1.17 follows from Rom.
1.16, and the discussion in Rom. 3.236 spells out ei! q pantaq toyq
pisteyontaq (Rom. 3.22c). Abraham's pistiq is dened by his
believing. Only God's pistiq appears independently of this pattern
(Rom. 3.34). What content can we give to pisteyein as we explore
the patterns of thought revealed in the passage? It means `to take
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God at his word' rather than simply `to give credence to'. This
shows clearly in the case of Abraham's believing in Gen. 15.6. In
Gen. 15.5 God makes him a promise, and he believes God. Again,
believing is a matter of relationship. The believer's faith consists in
believing God's word as it is spoken, accepting God's address, and
continuing to rely on it. Believing in Jesus means believing in him
as the one in and through whom God acts (Rom. 3.25a; 4.245).
This discussion deals only with the aspects of Paul's understanding
of faith that are visible in this passage. Because he was preaching
here about God's righteousness, our view of his thought through
this text does not include the matter of faith in relation to the
lordship of Christ.
In exegesis in the Luther tradition, the theocentric pole of the
problem of righteousness is often seen as an issue of how God can
righteously justify sinners simply because they believe. The problem
of sin is failure to meet God's righteous requirements. This context
makes it easy, especially in popular theology, for God's grace to
appear as the solution to that extent, an emergency measure.
Then faith can easily become an alternative work, an attainable
condition that God set when human beings failed to attain justication by meeting the demands of the law. The Cross can be seen as a
way of satisfying the demands of justice, so that God is not guilty
of calling black white. This worst-case scenario is not representative
of serious modern scholarly interpretation of Rom. 1.164.25. The
view that attempting to justify oneself by works is in itself sinful
means that grace is not simply an emergency measure, for instance.
Similarly, even when dikaiosynh ueoy is taken to refer primarily to
the righteousness of the justied, God's righteousness is still seen to
be revealed in the justication of sinners.
The worst-case scenario highlights some problems of interpretation within the traditional framework, and reminds us of their
impact on much contemporary faith and preaching.
The preaching and the pattern of thought we have found in the
passage show a different view of God's action through the Cross.
Grace is not a response to sinners' failure to be righteous, although
God in grace deals with that failure. Rather, God's grace is the
ground of human righteousness. Faith is not a precondition for a
Dikaioq verdict, or simply the means of receiving a gift of righteousness. It is one essential part of human righteousness, the other
being God's grace. Thus, the believer receives the verdict Dikaioq,
and God is righteous in justifying the one who believes in Jesus
200
(Rom. 3.26). God's righteousness in the Cross is not meeting an

abstract requirement of justice. God acts as righteous eschatological judge and as saviour, vindicating his own righteousness and
creating the righteousness of the believer. If righteousness is
conduct in conformity with a norm, the norm here is the Creator
creature relationship, which includes the encounter of faith with
grace and, inseparable from that, the proper being of both Creator
and creature. This proper being is reected in the language of the
passage: God's dikaiosynh stands independently, while the human
being is dikaivueiq/dikaioq e!k pistevq; God's pistiq stands
independently, while the human being's pistiq is dened by
believing.
Again, this text offers only a partial view of Paul's thinking.
Because the preaching concerns God's righteousness in giving the
verdict, the character of life being lived under the judgement of
justication is not included, nor is the cluster of ideas associated
with Paul's e!n XristCv.
Re-examining the justication presupposition
We have studied the justication theology as the direct presupposition of Paul's preaching in Rom. 1.164.25 and deepened our
understanding by exploring it as arising from events the Fall, the
Cross, the preaching of the Cross, believers' response, God's
justication of the believers, the Abraham story, and the expected
eschatological judgement. Have we found evidence that Paul's
visible presupposition all believers are sinners being justied by
God's grace is a particular application of a universal theological
statement that Paul could have made, the stuff of philosophy and
dogma? This would be, All human beings are sinners who are
offered justication through faith as a gift of God's grace. This
would come close to the formulation of the justication theology
with which we started this exploration. This question is formulated
according to the constraints governing our study. We should need a
study of the whole Pauline corpus to obtain a fuller view of Paul's
thought on justication.
We begin by looking again at paq in Rom. 1.163.26. In chapter
6 we asked what Paul was intending to say to the Romans with this
paq, and formed an hypothesis, substantiated by the teleological
reading, that it is an example of one common usage of èverybody'.
The universal statement is made for the sake of the case under
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consideration. Attention is not on the general truth of the statement

(which is taken for granted), but on its applicability to the speaker
and addressee/s. Thus, the panteq of Rom. 3.23 was saying something like, ànd that means you and me, conservative fellow-Jew.
We are not an exception, different from Gentile sinners.' Now we
consider the fact that the text can function in this way precisely
because the speaker can assume that both speaker and addressee
accept the general statement. This means that for causal study we
can bring a different question to Paul's paq, What are the limits of
the àll'? To what category does it refer? We have established that it
refers to all believers, but there are hints that it goes wider, that we
are getting a glimpse of a truly universal àll'.
Paq in Rom. 2.9, 10 and o%soi in Rom. 2.12 refer to the
eschatological judgement, which was understood to be universal.
There is another glimpse of this in Rom. 3.56. In Rom. 3.920 the
argument is that the Torah adds sinful Jew to sinful Gentile, i% na
pan stoma fragC h kai y"podikoq genhtai paq o" kosmoq tCv ueCv
(Rom. 3.19b). In the case of judgement, then, the category
`believers' is part of the larger category `humankind'.
The teleological reading does not show whether or not Paul
believed that the sinners of Rom. 1.18 included all humankind. Our
causal study, showing sin as the sin of Adam, indicates that he did.
This is consonant with Rom. 3.1920.
In Rom. 3.24b25a, Paul said that God set forth Christ as a
i" lasthrion through faith, and so there is redemption in Christ. No
limit is placed on who may receive this. Similarly, in Rom. 3.26, we
nd that God acted in this way so that he might be righteous even
in justifying the person of whom there is only one thing to be said,
This person believes in Jesus.
The underlying Creator-creature theology comes to the surface
of the text in the doja references of Rom. 1.23; 3.23; 4.20. We need
not move far outside Rom. 1.164.25 to nd conrmation of these
intimations of universality. Paul's statement of his missionary
obligation in Rom. 1.14 establishes that he believed the gospel was
for everybody.
This evidence shows that the universal statement, Àll human
beings are sinners who are offered justication through faith as a
gift of God's grace' is not simply one we can deduce from Paul's
text. We have good reason to believe that Paul would have
formulated it had the occasion arisen. It is not what he intended to
say with any of the statements in the passage we are studying. It is
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one of the structural elements of his theological thinking that we

see through the particularity of this preaching.
We return to the question of whether the formulation of the
justication theology with which we began would need to be
modied if it were to be a statement of Paul's view as we can see it
in this passage. Our new universal formulation reads: Àll human
beings are sinners who are offered justication through faith as a
gift of God's grace.' The formulation with which we began our
exploration was: `God justies believing sinners by grace through
faith. The foil to this is that human beings cannot justify themselves
by doing what God requires. All have sinned; all need God's grace;
God gives gracious justication to all who believe. There is no
other requirement.' We can restate this for clear comparison with
our new formulation: Àll human beings are sinners who, being
unable to justify themselves by doing what God requires, are
offered justication through faith as a gift of God's grace.' The
post-Sanders formulation `by doing what God requires' replaces
the older `by works of the law'.
The parallel formulation highlights the extra phrase `being
unable to justify themselves by doing what God requires'. Its
importance for exegesis in the Luther tradition is demonstrated by
the way the RSV translators modied Paul's text at Rom. 3.234a
`since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are
justied'. Why is it missing in the new formulation? The teleological
reading shows that Paul was not trying to persuade the Romans
that they could not justify themselves and therefore needed the gift
of grace. The phrase in the formulation derived from the Luther
tradition reects the perception that that is the function of Rom.
1.183.20. Is the insertion consistent with Paul's understanding of
sin and justication as we have been able to trace it in this text?
Certainly Paul's understanding of the nature of sin means that
the sinner cannot earn justication. Since he was starting from the
presupposition that all believers are sinners justied by grace, he
had no need to say so. In the passage, sinners are in bondage and
must be rescued by redemption. On the other hand, the traditional
formulation seems to allow the inference that there would be some
theoretical or protological state in which human beings could
attain righteousness by doing what God requires. A strong strand
of exegesis in the Luther tradition holds that according to Paul the
attempt to do this is in itself sinful. That underlines the relevant
feature of the theology in Paul's preaching: doing what God
203
requires is an effect, and therefore evidence, of being righteous, that

is, properly related to the Creator as human creature. We saw that
the extra clause leaves room for a view of grace as an emergency
measure. To reect Paul's thinking as we have been able to trace it
here, the inserted clause should be removed from our formulation.
If we were to attempt a formulation of Paul's justication theology
as it can be traced in the whole Pauline corpus, we should need to
reconsider this question.
The law
The law is not mentioned in either of our formulations of the
justication theology. This is a long move from the view that Paul
argued that human beings are not justied by works of the law and
therefore need grace. It occurred because in our teleological reading
of Rom. 1.164.25 we did not nd the law playing such a role. This
is consonant with the recognition that extant records of rstcentury Judaism do not show the Torah as a means of selfjustication.
What role does the nomoq play in Paul's preaching in Rom.
1.164.25? How is it perceived? What can we learn from that about
his thought?
In the context of the letter situation, the nomoq must be understood as the Torah, not (as in the Luther tradition until recently) as
the principle of legalism, with the law used as a means of selfjustication. In Rom. 3.274.25 it is seen in its fullness as God's
revelation, including the law of Moses but also the history of God's
dealings with Israel. It functions, in line with Rom. 3.21b, as
witness to God's new action in Christ.
Rom. 1.183.20 is more difcult. Paul was dealing with the
disjunction in The Conservative's self-understanding. He understood himself as a member of Israel, a sinful human being
graciously accepted by God, but at the same time he understood
himself as a member of Israel over against Gentile sinners, one of
God's righteous people. The Torah, here primarily the Mosaic law
in practice, was the instrument and mark of Israel's difference. In
the debate with which Paul was dealing, it was virtually being
hijacked for service of the element of superiority and favoured
status over against the Gentiles. Having the law made Jews better
and favoured at the judgement. It was in this way that the Torah
came in as the rst defence against the logical inference Paul was
204
drawing from God's righteousness as judge. The inference was that

God is impartial, therefore Jews who have the law are rst in
vindication and in condemnation. In Rom. 2.123.20, Paul dealt
with the way the Torah was being hijacked for the service of Jewish
privilege. He did it on Jewish terms, by showing that the criterion
of judgement is doing the law (Rom. 2.1213). This receives some
positive description in Rom. 2.7 and some negative description in
Rom. 2.8, 1724. It does not appear as the scoring of good and bad
deeds, but rather as a matter of attitude and the consistency of
behaviour with belief. In effect, a person's actions are a measure of
whether or not she is under sin. The Torah has this instrumental
function in Rom. 2.1213. To use it to bolster up the position of
Jewish sinner over against Gentile sinner is to misuse it in a way
that is itself sinful, and causes Gentiles to blaspheme against God
(Rom. 2.234). The Jewish believer who tries that will nd that the
Torah itself places the Jewish sinner before God's righteous judgement of wrath on the same terms as the Gentile sinner.
The function of Rom. 3.20 in the preaching and in the pattern of
thought is interesting. In the preaching, Paul pointed out as a
matter of fact that through the law comes knowledge of sin (Rom.
3.20b). That is the ground for e!j ergvn nomoy oy! dikaivuhsetai
pasa sarj e!nvpion ay!toy (Rom. 3.20a). That clause, in turn, joins
with the application of the catena to provide the ground for Rom.
3.19b where the whole world, Gentile plus Jew, is arraigned before
God.
Two comments are in order here. The practical assertion that
through the law comes knowledge of sin coheres perfectly with The
Conservative's self-understanding in relation to God, that he is a
sinner graciously received, and the fact that he is a sinner has
underlain the whole discussion. The issue has been, in effect,
whether his sin is somehow less sinful than Gentile sin. The second
comment begins with a question. Why have e!j ergvn nomoy in
Rom. 3.20a? This has been a key element in much exegesis in the
Luther tradition. In the preaching, it is a summary way of referring
to the criterion of judgement in Rom. 2.1213, doing the law not
hearing it. The statement e!j ergvn nomoy oy! dikaivuhsetai pasa
sarj (Rom. 3.20) denies a theological position which, as far as we
know, does not belong in the theology of either Israel or the church
of that time. On the other hand, The Conservative's attempt to use
the Torah as a shield against God's judgement and the proposal
that Gentile believers should be required to become Jews and
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therefore keep the law both come dangerously close to perverting

the Torah in this way. In the latter case, this is less obvious in the
proposition than it would be in practice, when proselytes accepted
circumcision and took up the food and sabbath laws. The suggestion is that The Conservative (i.e. those people in the church whom
he represents) is treating the Torah as if doing it is what makes
Jews acceptable to God. He ought to know that law-keeping
follows from acceptance and not vice versa; it is a Jewish response
to God's grace as it has been given to Israel. Having said all that,
we note that this is a turn of phrase characteristic of Paul's
participation in this debate. It could be that a study of Galatians, in
particular, would add to the understanding we have been able to
derive from this passage.
In the older pattern of exegesis in the Luther tradition, Rom.
3.20 becomes a paradigmatic statement of the human predicament.
It is a problem to which only divine grace offers a solution. Paul
presented it as the outcome of The Conservative's false approach to
the Torah as symbol of the election of Israel. It puts The Conservative in a true and proper position, and in fact amounts to a
statement about God's grace.
The question of the nature and role of sin in Paul's justication
theology is closely allied with the questions about the Torah. We
can now see clearly that the problem of sin in relation to the Torah
is not that it prevents human beings from justifying themselves by
doing what God requires, which is dened and measured by the
Torah. Rather, sin perverts even the gifts of God's grace, in this
case the Torah, into possessions, into marks of deserving, even of
achievement.
Review of the causal exposition
In this chapter we have been exploring Paul's thinking as we can
trace it in Rom. 1.164.25, focussing on two theological presuppositions. They are ideas which had a large part in generating the
preaching, the justication theology and the Creatorcreature
relationship. They have helped us to understand the preaching as
springing from a pattern of thought that we can accept as rational
and credible. They do not by themselves account for the preaching.
The other major factor is Paul's intention to preach to the Romans
in their particular situation.
We have also seen how Paul's intention to preach in the way he
206
did has shaped the forms in which his presuppositions appear in the
text. Two points warrant further comment. First, the exploration of
the idea of sin played a large role in elucidating the Creator
creature ideas. This is not because it was critical, or even necessarily
seminal, for Paul's thinking about this theologoumenon. The large
role reects the fact that that is where the evidence happens to be
clearest and most extensive. This is the case because Paul needed to
deal with the desire of some Jewish believers to see election in terms
of privilege. Second, the role of the law is very much smaller in the
theological sub-strata of the text than it is in the preaching. It has a
large role in the preaching because of its signicance in the church's
problem. It seems that the problem had a large role in creating the
theological thinking, too, but it drove Paul back to think about the
action God took apart from the law.
For the causal reading there is no testing process parallel to the
battery of tests applied to the teleological reading. The control
function of the tests is partly replaced by the discipline of working
with the teleological reading. In the practice of exegesis by the
two-step method, further control would be exercised by the need
to look for consistency or credible explanations of inconsistency
throughout the Pauline corpus.
We have now completed our two-step exegesis of Rom.
1.164.25. It does not show the insoluble problems we identied
with the justication-account reading. We have made sense of the
text both as communication and as springing from a pattern of
thinking that we can accept as rational and credible. We have
found that Paul was not talking to the Romans about the justication theology, but that it has an important role in the meaning of
the text. We have seen how the text was generated in part by some
of Paul's theological ideas, and how the forms in which those ideas
appear in the text are controlled by what he was intending the
Romans to hear when it was read to them.
This causal reading has been subject to one important limitation.
We have not been able to draw on the rest of the Pauline corpus to
develop a fuller understanding of the underlying thought patterns.
This limitation is given not with the two-step method of exegesis,
but with the fact that this is the rst experiment with it. Ideally, a
two-step exegesis of one passage would be part of continuing study
of all of Paul's extant letters by the same method, making wider
knowledge available. Since we do not know how the other letters
would appear if we applied to them the method we have begun to
207
apply to Romans, we do not have that wider knowledge as a

source. In the initial experiment, this has the advantage of illustrating the discipline of beginning with what we can see through the
window of the text being studied. That would always have to be
done.
At this point, it is worth considering some other readers of Paul's
text. In the teleological reading we were seeking the element of
meaning in the text that was what Paul intended the Romans to
hear when it was read to them. This corresponds to what we should
normally call `the meaning' of a lecture or sermon, an address for a
particular occasion. We now note that the Romans had Paul's
address in the form of a text which they kept. Having listened and
received the message, they could go back to the text again and
again, and come to a fuller understanding. We can do the same if
we have a copy of an address. The Romans' ways of doing this, and
the questions and background knowledge they brought to it, would
be different from ours. Again, if we are listening to a lecture by
somebody whose mind we know well, we are likely to notice how
she is drawing on a wider understanding to say what is to be said to
this audience. Some of the Romans might well have been doing
that when Paul's letter was read. Prisca and Aquila, for instance,
could even have shared in the development of the theology. Our
two-step exegesis does not involve an historical judgement that the
Romans heard only what we found in the teleological reading and
the theological substructure was a closed book to them.
We may also want to ask whether Luther got it wrong. If Luther
had been an historical-critical exegete who, actually or ostensibly,
wanted to know what Paul was saying to the Romans, then we
should have to say that he did get it wrong. He would have had no
chance of getting it right, since the historical information was not
available. Luther was not an historical-critical exegete. The
question he brought to the text led him, we can now see, not into
Paul's preaching but into the underlying theology. The answer
he found was a valid Pauline answer, and it was good news for the
late medieval church in which he found himself, or at least for
parts of it.
13
REVIEW AND CONCLUSION
In our study of Rom. 1.164.25, we have asked some fundamental

questions and developed new exegetical attitudes and techniques.
We now review these and consider the signicance of their outcomes.
Rom. 1.164.25 A new basic conception in continuity with
the old
In chapter 2, we argued that the basic conception guiding mainstream exegesis of Rom. 1.164.25 is inadequate and needs to be
replaced. We proposed testing the hypothesis that Paul was trying
to do something other than give a justication account but the
justication theology was important for whatever that was. We
suggested further that if this hypothesis is correct, we could expect
our conception of the passage to change in two major stages. In the
rst, we should see the passage as a justication account inuenced
by the different issue. In the second, we should have a new basic
conception arising from a new understanding of Paul's intention.
The changes resulting from study of the law questions could
represent the rst stage.
We have found that Paul was dealing with the question of how
God could be seen to be righteous if he justied believers on the
basis of their faith without reference to the JewGentile distinction.
He did this not as one giving an account, even a polemical account,
of justication, but as one preaching the gospel to believers for
whom this was a major practical issue. The justication theology is
important for this preaching as the source of the question and
therefore as a presupposition of much of the address to the Roman
believers. Paul's answer to the question afrmed the justication
theology. The two-step reading that yielded these results resolves
the major problems that led us to formulate the new hypothesis,
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209
and accounts for the text more successfully than readings developed
according to the old basic conception. It shows the law in a
different light, especially by separating it from the denition of sin
that emerges from Paul's discussion.
Our new basic conception does represent the second stage of the
proposed two-stage change in our understanding, and so appears as
an intelligible development in historical-critical study of the passage.
The phrase ! IoydaiCv te prvton kai % Ellhni (Rom. 1.16b) is a
textbook example. In traditional exegesis, Rom. 1.1617 is the key
statement of salvation through the gospel, righteousness through
faith. ! IoydaiCv te prvton kai % Ellhni appears as an insertion that
is hard to interpret. Dodd, for instance, could only say that Paul
recognizes that the Jews did in fact receive the gospel rst,
according to God's will.1 More commonly, it was seen either as
pointing to the universal nature of the gospel over against the
earlier special position of Israel, or as providing for the continuity
of the plan of salvation. The rst stage of the shift appears in
exegeses that recognize the importance of the priority of Israel for
the faithfulness of God. It is fully established in Ziesler's and
Dunn's commentaries. Both still give the impression that the phrase
is added in, but it is seen as seminal for important elements of the
meaning of the letter.2 When we explained Rom. 1.1617 as Paul
going to the heart of the issue of faith in the church and making the
Romans ask questions, the phrase was both important and clearly
integral to the whole. This represents the second stage of the shift.
This development is reected in exegesis of the whole passage.
Older exegesis saw it as exposition of justication, culturally
conditioned by the JewGentile distinction. More recently it has
been seen as an account of justication that had a role in dealing
with the impact of the gospel on the JewGentile distinction. The
two-step exegesis shows it as pastoral work, dealing with the new
JewGentile relationship created by God's gracious justication of
believing sinners on the basis of faith alone.
A new historical-critical approach to Paul's letters
Our two-part exegesis tests not only our original hypothesis about
this passage, but also the exegetical methods and emphases by
1
2
The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, 9.

Ziesler, Romans, 70; Dunn, Romans, 47.
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which it was developed. Thus, the experiment has yielded an

alternative reading of Rom. 1.164.25 and also an alternative
historical-critical approach to Paul's letters. Whence this new
approach? What are its special characteristics?
The new approach is unusual among alternative methods in that
it arises from the problems and successes of mainstream historicalcritical exegesis rather than being an application of a theory or
technique imported from some other eld. It arises from a convergence of the major questions raised in chapter 1 with the exegetical
problems of Rom. 1.164.25 and other Pauline texts. A useful
starting-point for examining it is the collapse of the basic tool
question, What does this text mean?
Critical to the way we understand a text is the battery of
questions, with their presuppositions, that we bring to it. Readers
of this study will have noticed a continual spelling out of questions
to be asked. This contrasts with mainstream exegesis, where the
questions form a skeleton shaping the exegesis but not itself on
view. The basic question is, What does this text mean? Its hermeneutical collapse is not bringing mainstream Pauline exegesis to a
halt because it is assumed that the consensus of the debate, the
basic conception of a text, is the answer. This corresponds to our
observation in chapter 3 that the mainstream debate on Rom.
1.164.25 is being conducted with a consensus understanding that
the whole is an exposition of justication. This approach involves
the presupposition that there is such a thing as `the meaning of the
text', and its nature is self-evident.
In chapter 1, we considered the breakdown of that presupposition. This massive problem has proved to be a primary creative
point in our work. It forced us to ask what we want from our
encounter with the text. If the answer to such a question is not to be
purely idiosyncratic, we must be able to turn to something other
than the text for an answer. We received one answer from two
sources. The Christian NT scholar's concern with Paul's apostolic
testimony and the concern of the NT scholar per se with the text as
one of Paul's letters both require that we ask what Paul was saying
to the Romans. We can explore the text, as Paul's and as apostolic
testimony, further by examining it as a source for Paul's theology
and for a picture of him as pastor and as person. This answer kept
us working with the understanding of meaning as governed by
authorial intention. It was the recognition that we needed to nd a
new basic conception of Rom. 1.164.25 that made us re-examine
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the procedures and interests of mainstream historical-critical

exegesis.
Mainstream exegetes ask, What does this text mean? What are
they seeking? Interpreting the question by the answers given (the
content and range of the debate), we nd that they are seeking an
understanding of Paul's thought as it comes to expression in the
text. One of the clearest indicators of this is the criterion of
coherence. In the mainstream debate, the measure of the coherence
of one of Paul's letters is the coherence of the underlying thought.
This may be sought at the expense of its coherence as communication. The question that we put rst because of our concern with the
text as Paul's and as letter, the question of what Paul was saying to
the addressees, is in practice secondary. Having a transcript of what
Paul was saying, mainstream exegetes ask what the text means and
then say that their answer is what Paul was saying to the addressees. Thus, the two questions become forms of the one question.
This process, however, depends on the presupposition that we are
seeking the meaning of the text, and that this single entity is there
to be found.
We have separated the two questions and reversed the sequence.
We separated them on the ground that they will be different forms
of the same question only if Paul was intending to give an account
of his thought. In reading a collection of occasional, pastoral letters
we cannot assume this. Accordingly, the questions must be asked
separately. If in any one case the answers to the two prove to be the
same, then in that case he probably was expounding his thought on
the particular issue/s. When the questions are separated, each gives
rise to other questions, some of them new to the debate.
We reversed the sequence of the two questions because Paul's
intention is primary in the creation of the text, and gives it its
nature. We are giving effective recognition to the fact that he was
writing to people who were in situations and had problems,
whereas mainstream exegesis, with its focus on Paul's thought,
tends to see him addressing situations and problems. We saw this in
Beker's work, vitiating his concern with the contingency of the
letters, their occasional, pastoral character.
The separation and reversal of the questions gives its character to
our new style of historical-critical exegesis of Paul's letters. It
involves a teleological reading and a causal reading. It also gives
rise to certain characteristic features. The most important of these
are the redened and more inuential question of purpose, the
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characterization of the personae involved, the separation of coherence of thought and coherence of communication, the examination
of the nature of the text, and the criterion of intelligibility.
The teleological reading of any letter (in principle, of any text)
answers the question, Where was this going to? It involves reading
the text in the light of its goal, the achievement of the author's
purpose. The causal reading answers the question, Where was this
coming from? It is concerned with the text as giving expression to
the author's thought, and therefore as giving readers at least some
access to that thought. In theory, it might be objected that this
distinction is articial because the two elements interact so closely.
In practice, applying the distinction to Rom. 1.164.25 has freed us
from trying to do too many things at once, and allowed us to see
the text and Paul in a new light.
Because of the dominance of causal reading in the historicalcritical search for `the meaning of the text', certain elements of the
teleological reading that are essential to our whole understanding
of the text are reduced or not considered. Giving them their due
place has been important in giving us a new view.
The rst is the question of purpose. In causal reading, purpose
becomes an element of cause. Why did Paul write this letter to these
people at this time? It becomes an introductory question, part of
the preparation for detailed exegesis. In teleological reading,
purpose is by denition central, and the question is a true purpose
question: What response was Paul trying to elicit from the people
to whom this letter was being sent? While the answers to the two
questions overlap considerably, the difference of emphasis is critical
for exegesis. In this study, it has been an important factor in our
approach to the text as communication rather than as a network of
ideas, and as pastoral speech rather than as exposition. The
question of why Paul wrote this letter in these circumstances can be
asked only when we know what we mean by `this letter'. The true
purpose question allows the possibility of questioning what we
thought we knew about the letter.
The true purpose question involves a more sharply focussed
concern with the addressees. They are considered not as a sociological grouping or a theological point of view, but as the intended
recipients of this letter. We do not scour the sources for every scrap
of information about the Roman church in the fties in order to
form the most detailed possible picture of the recipients of the
letter. Rather, we examine Paul's text to see how he perceived his
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addressees. Information about the church in Rome helps us interpret the evidence, since it helps us to establish the issues and the
setting; it does not control our picture of Paul's addressees. The
technique of identifying the personae involved The Apostle, The
Congregation, The Conservative is applicable to all the letters. It
may seem cumbersome, but we need the disciplines that will hold us
to the teleological reading. It is fatally easy to be drawn away into
the old global study of meaning.
In this study, the identication of the audience was sharpened by
two particular investigations. Examination of paq in Rom.
1.164.25 led to the hypothesis, vindicated by the teleological
reading, that this paq was referring to accepted general or universal
truth for the sake of the particular case in hand. It is not the
universal àll' of philosophical-theological discourse, as is assumed
without investigation in mainstream exegesis. This discovery forced
us to consider audience more closely in chapters 7 and, especially,
8. The lack of direct address to the Romans in the passage and the
substitution of discussion with a dialogue partner led to the
identication and characterization of The Conservative. In this
respect, the passage is atypical. I have not found in the Pauline
corpus any other diatribal dialogues that shift the address like this
for so long.
In study of other letters, the sharply focussed purpose and
audience questions can modify our view. For instance, identication of opponents is widely seen as an important key to understanding Pauline letters. This takes account of the polemical
character of much of Paul's extant writing, but often at the cost of
its pastoral nature. Brinsmead's puzzled comment on Galatians
shows the problem involved: `Thus the dialogical nature of Galatians stands out. It is a letter motivated by an intruding, offending
theology, yet it addresses the theology almost exclusively by addressing the congregation that has been `bewitched' by the intruders.'3
In fact, Paul's purpose in Galatians needs to be differently conceived. It was to do everything possible to rescue the Galatians
from the temptation to accept circumcision. When his purpose is
understood on the basis of the conict model, it is conceived as a
defence of the justication theology and/or an argument against the
opponents' case. This turns the Galatians into a jury. Something
similar although less striking occurred in our examination of
3
Galatians Dialogical Response to Opponents, 187.
214
Romans. Over against the tendency to see Romans as in some sense

apologetic, we have seen Paul preaching to a committed and cooperative audience. In both cases, Paul's role as missionary and
pastor is rescued from unconscious assimilation to the adversarial
patterns of modern academic debate.
Awareness of the letter as address shows also in another important difference between causal and teleological reading. We noted
that for mainstream exegesis coherence is the coherence of Paul's
thought. That coherence question belongs to causal reading. It
causes exegetes to read each of Paul's letters with one eye on the
text and one on the rest of the corpus. There is nothing wrong with
this. In our causal reading, too, the criterion of coherence is the
coherence of Paul's thought. The severely limited discussion in
chapter 12 shows how necessary is the context of the other letters
for such work. On the other hand, when the only reading is causal,
the function and character of the text as communication is distorted. The teleological reading is concentrated on the one letter
and is concerned with coherence of communication. This shows the
importance of separating the two questions and recognizing that
they are complementary, so that both are necessary for full understanding and exposition.
An example of the difference created by focussing on the one
letter is the treatment of Abraham in our teleological reading of
Romans 4. There is recognition in the mainstream debate that the
discussions of Abraham in Romans 4 and Galatians 3 are different
and should not be assimilated to each other. On the other hand,
one is still used to interpret the other, on the basis that Gen. 15.6 is
a key Pauline proof-text for justication by faith, and that both
passages are discussions of the role of faith in justication. We
referred to Galatians in our study of Romans 4, not to learn about
Paul's view of Abraham, but for help in dening the context of his
discussion. This was part of the common ground between Paul and
the Romans, and it does not show clearly enough in Romans itself.
We used Galatians as a contemporary document to help establish
the setting, as we might use Acts or Philo in another case. This
helped us to examine Romans 4 in its own context and on its own
terms. What we found was not an exposition of Abraham as a key
example of justication by faith, but an exploration of Abraham's
fatherhood, showing that justication of believers on the basis of
faith without distinction between Jew and Gentile was the fullment of God's intention in the election of Abraham. Of course, no
215
modern scholar can read one of Paul's letters except in the context
of a picture of Paul derived from centuries of study of all of them.
This does not invalidate the attempt to read them one at a time.
Recognition of the need for a teleological reading freed us for
and directed us to careful consideration of the nature of the text.
Causal reading in practice involves treating the text more as a
network of ideas than as communication (although the latter is not
simply missing from mainstream exegesis). Giving primary emphasis to the text as address to its particular audience led us to a
study of rst-century letters. The general results are applicable to
all Paul's letters. They were all created in the speakinghearing
context for listeners. Therefore they all demand from us the
appropriate responses, different from our responses to other texts
on our desks.
Arising from concern with the text as communication, and
sharpened by this study of rst-century letters, is the criterion of
intelligibility. It is a powerful factor in teleological reading. A
general formulation is: Any proposed teleological reading should
allow the text to full the purpose for which it was created. Since
Romans is a letter dictated for a listening audience, the text must be
able to get the message across to its listeners at a rst hearing. The
debate does not recognize the criterion of intelligibility. So radically
true is this statement that scholars generally nd utterly incomprehensible any suggestion that a proposed reading of a passage
cannot represent Paul's intention because his intended audience
would have had no hope of recognizing it. I have heard an entire
theological community, NT scholars included, burst out laughing
at the suggestion that Paul's churches might have understood his
letters. The burden of proof is therefore on the exegete who wants
to use intelligibility as a criterion.
We argued in chapter 2 that a Paul whose letters were poor
communication is an historical improbability. The Paul who
emerges from mainstream historical-critical scholarship expressed
his ideas and sent them to his churches. The ideas treated their
issues. Apparently, he expected them to treat the letters the way
scholars do, to take mysterious texts and pore over them until they
yielded up their meaning. They had no tradition of interpretation
to guide them, but neither did they have a two-millennia culture
gap to cross. It is proper for us, who do have this gap to cross, to
have to pore over the letters to get them to yield up their meaning.
It is not, however, proper to propose interpretations that would have
216
forced Paul's churches to do likewise. To us, the letters are scripture

or the subject-matter of our discipline, so they have a claim on
inordinate quantities of time and energy. To Paul's churches, they
were not scripture, but messages he was anxious to convey in
particular situations. Furthermore, he had (at least in some cases)
to establish his claim on his readers' attention by the impact of
what was being read to them. These are the reasons for insisting on
the criterion of intelligibility in readings that claim to be what Paul
was saying to his addressees.
That does not mean that the recipients of the letters would not
have pored over them, too, and learnt more than they had rst
heard. It does mean that we must assume that Paul intended to say
something comprehensible and directly responsive to their needs.
We do not have to make Paul into a superman who always
succeeded in what he intended to do, but we do need to allow that
our problems of understanding are likely to arise from some failure
on our part. One precept of historical-critical exegesis is that
biblical texts must be taken seriously as human documents, not
treated as direct divine revelation, beyond criticism. In avoiding
this risk, we incur another. Exegetes may too easily be satised with
readings which show the NT writers in a very poor light, and not be
sufciently insistent on allowing themselves to be challenged by the
text.
The criterion of intelligibility is not used in the debate because
interest is in Paul's thought rather than his communication. One
reason for this attitude is that pastoral work in many modern
Western churches is conceived in terms that are heavily psychological and sociological, and conditioned by a world view in which
religion is a matter of private preference, a hobby, like golf or
gardening. In our world, ordinary people do not usually understand
themselves and their problems theologically. Theological language
is for theological discourse. Generally, twentieth-century minds
balk at the idea that when Paul talked to fellow-believers about sin,
grace and being justied, he was talking directly to real people
about their personal experience. If he is seen to be doing so, this
means that he was interpreting and explaining it theologically. In
the rst century, Paul's language about grace and faith operated in a
realm that has more in common with Luther throwing an ink pot at
the Devil. In contrast, many present-day exegetes lived through the
`death of God' debate of the sixties, when it was often considered
unreasonable to suggest that ordinary Christians should learn what
217
`sin' means, although nobody would have dreamt of suggesting that

ordinary drivers need not learn what àccelerator' means.
This situation creates a double block between scholars and Paul's
texts. On the one hand, it seems unreal to move beyond Paul's
ability `to bring the gospel to speech in each new situation'4 and ask
what `faith', for instance, would have meant in practice. On the
other hand, the fact that Paul's terminology is in our world the
specialist language of theology awakens in us inappropriate responses, just as the fact that we read the letters in printed books
does.
We may again take the vocabulary and concept of faith as an
example, and take the opportunity to look at another letter. In his
article `The Function of PISTIS XRISTOY in Galatians', Taylor
argues that Paul's use of pistiq is predominantly in juridical
contexts, where he has to argue against the proposition that the law
is the source of righteousness. In these discussions, pistiq and
nomoq are contrasted on the basis of membership in the category of
juridical language. In Galatians 3, Paul uses diauhkh in the sense of
will, not of covenant, as a way of explaining how God's benets,
including righteousness, come as a free gift through Christ and
apart from the law to Jewish and Gentile beneciaries on the same
terms. Taylor spells out the terms, conditions and intended beneciaries of the diauhkh, showing that pistiq has a role in every
aspect. He then explains the Roman commissum dei, showing that
its elements correspond to those of God's diauhkh as discussed by
Paul in Galatians. In his exposition, Taylor further explains, Paul
uses pistiq to refer to the dei commissum on which the diauhkh
depends (Christ's faithfulness) and, separately, to the trustfulness
appropriate to the beneciaries (Abraham's and the believers'
faith). He sees the parallels between Paul's exposition and the
Roman provision as so detailed that they can hardly be accidental.
He therefore hypothesizes that Galatian law at least contained
elements that would enable the Galatians to follow his argument.
In this context, pistiq refers to Christ's reliability which ts him for
his tenure in commissum dei. Finally, a juridical understanding
rather than an understanding of pistiq as faith in Christ yields a
more intelligible reading of Galatians.
This approach is wholly conceptual. Taylor gives no attention to
the concrete referents of Paul's terms in the Galatians' situation
4
Beker, Paul the Apostle, 34.
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and the history of God's dealings with humanity. Nor has he put
himself in the Galatians' place. How were they supposed to know
when Paul started this argument in Gal. 2.15 that he was using
pistiq in this technical legal sense? The diauhkh on which it all
depends does not appear until Gal. 3.15, and then as a human
analogy. The Paul we saw leading his Roman readers so carefully
through the Abraham argument in Romans 4 does not match up
with this Paul! This is a good example of Pauline exegesis that
treats the texts as conceptual networks rather than as address.
Hays' book The Faith of Jesus Christ is very highly regarded. An
example of his exegetical method also shows treatment of the text
as a network of theological concepts. Examining the function of
pistiq in the narrative structure of Paul's gospel, he sets out to
explicate e!j a!kohq pistevq in Gal. 3.2.5 He has in mind the
tendency of Protestant exegesis to turn faith into a work, and is
developing his ideas in contrast with the kind of position represented by Betz. His method is to examine in detail the meaning and
function of pistiq in Gal. 3.2, 11, 22, and reinterpret Galatians 3
accordingly. Parallel passages to be used are Gal. 2.20; 3.26; Rom.
3.216. He is arguing that in the three texts Paul was not talking
about the saving effect of believing, or about Jesus as the object of
human faith. This tells us that he understands the context to be
Paul's account of justication.
Having established the problem and the method, Hays begins
with e!j a!kohq pistevq in Gal. 3.2. He tabulates the grammatical
possibilities and the exegetical suggestions. He then looks at the
other uses of a!koh in the letters commonly accepted as Pauline,
Rom. 10.1617; 1 Cor. 12.17; 1 Thess. 2.13. From study of these
passages he concludes that a!koh means `message: (what is heard)'
rather than àct of hearing'. Accordingly, he postulates this for Gal.
3.2, 5. He deals with the antithetical parallelism with e!j ergvn
nomoy by arguing that the two must be taken as ìndivisible
meaning-units', and that a contrast between a human and a divine
activity makes better sense than a contrast between two human
activities as basis for God's action. He argues this case for Gal. 3.5,
but not for Gal. 3.2. This leads him to accept `message' rather than
`hearing' not an unreasonable conclusion from the evidence he
considers relevant and in the context he postulates. He then
discusses the possibilities this leaves for pistiq, again considering
5
13949.
219
some other verses. He concludes that, even if pistiq does mean

`believing' in some sense, the emphasis is on the message believed,
and it is at least possible that it functions as a collective designation
for `that which is believed'.
Tackling his problem in this way, Hays handles the text as
theological exposition and as expression of Paul's thought. He
shares the assumption that we are dealing with Paul's apologia for
justication through faith, and assumes that in Gal. 3.25 Paul was
intending to talk about how God gives the gift of salvation to
people. The evidence he considers relevant includes various other
Pauline texts. He deals with the exegetical problems of this paragraph and the whole of Gal. 3.14.11 without ever offering a
reading of the passage.
If we treat the text as address and apply the criterion of
intelligibility, we tackle the interpretation of e!j a!kohq pistevq
differently. First, Paul was not talking about the universal question
of how God gives salvation to people. In the letter, he was making
a strenuous effort to save the Galatians from succumbing to the
temptation to add circumcision to their faith in Christ. He was
talking to people who were in the process of making a momentous
decision about what they should do. Should they add circumcision
to their faith in Christ or continue as Gentile believers? In Gal. 3.1
he reminded them of the powerful preaching of Christ crucied that
they had heard. Then he introduced his question in a way that
underlined its importance and demanded an answer (Gal. 3.2a).
That is, he engaged the Galatians in working this through with
him. They were not to be mere auditors. The question took them
back to the occasion (already evoked in Gal. 3.1) when they rst
heard and responded to the gospel, an experience that changed
their lives. Twentieth-century Western exegetes, in a culture where
(the aftermath of ) Christianity is part of the order of things, easily
forget how dramatic that was. The question asked about what they
did on that memorable occasion when they received the Spirit. It
was asked in the context of their need to decide what they were
going to do now in relation to receiving the gift of God, eschatological justication. The question begins with the impossible alternative, which is something one does, works of the law. Set against it
is e!j a!kohq pistevq. ! Akoh is a perfectly ordinary word with
several ordinary meanings. In the context of doing, it means
`hearing'. That corresponded to something they did on that memorable occasion. The Spirit came when they heard and believed, that
220
is, heard with faith. Paul hammered that home with a series of
questions to show just how fundamental it was, and how they
should look to that experience when faced with this temptation.
The second question (Gal. 3.5) is about things that God does for
them. Whereas the question about their conversion was put in
terms of how they received God's action, the question about their
continuing experience is put in terms of the basis on which God
gives the things they are receiving. The same choice is offered. In
this context, it is not at all ridiculous to ask whether God acts on
the basis of something the Galatians are doing. This is not theory,
but a question about what is happening and how they are participating in it.
What does `faith' mean in these verses? We may sharpen the
question: Does our reading have Paul convincing the Galatians
that they can get God to do things for them by a mental act of
believing rather than a physical act of circumcision? Taylor and
Hays found that an appropriate way to express their concern.6 This
problem arises not from Paul's text, or even from Paul's thought,
but from the later debate over justication by faith alone. That
shapes the way exegesis in the Luther tradition conceives Paul's
idea of faith. It is governed by the soteriological alternatives of
faith or works of the law, believing or doing, receiving or earning.
This leads to the kind of debate that is reected in the contrast
between Dodd's and Byrne's accounts. Dodd describes an àttitude
of pure receptivity in which the soul appropriates what God has
done'.7 Byrne argues that Christians are justied in Christ and
Christ is justied on the basis of his work of obedience. `God's
gracious justication runs its full course in Christians in so far as
they ``remain within'' and live out in their own lives the justifying
obedience of Christ.'8
In writing Galatians, Paul was not faced with a question about
the theology of justication, or with a choice between faith and
works. He was helping the Galatians face the question of what they
needed to do to be sure of receiving at the eschaton the salvation
promised in the gospel, and the choice was between faith and faith
plus works of the law. He reminded them that God had acted and
was acting among them òn the basis of ' their faith, and that God
justied Abraham because Abraham believed. How did he expect
6
7
8
Taylor, PISTIS, 75; Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ, 140.

The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, 56.
Reckoning with Romans, 66.
221
them to understand the `believing' terminology? The modern faith

works contrast was simply not on the scene. Their believing was
not separable from God's action that created it, and not separable
from the fact that it had turned their lives upside down, given them
a new Lord, a new fellowship and new ways of living. Paul did not
expect them to sort out some theological essence of faith as pure
belief, or decide how far faith was separable from works. He was
helping them decide whether to continue as they were or change
their lifestyle, adding to their allegiance to Christ a responsibility to
the law of Moses.
Similarly, we have argued that when Paul was talking about faith
to the Romans in Rom. 1.164.25 the issue was faith over against
faith plus membership in Israel. Again, the question of a theological
essence of `faith' was not at stake. For those people, faith and a
new lifestyle were inseparable. This does not imply that the faith or
works question is theologically invalid, or that Paul's texts will not
yield a Pauline answer to it. If we read Paul's texts through that
question we shall be led away from what he intended to say to his
addressees, and risk misunderstanding the underlying theology.
These are the inappropriate sets of responses to which we refer
when we say that Paul's letters are treated in the debate as
theological exposition. Correspondingly, the life-settings of the
letters are understood primarily in conceptual terms. A classic
example is the debate over whether the opponents in Corinth were
Gnostics or Enthusiasts. Such a question is necessary but not
sufcient. Some help with recognizing the `real-life' quality of the
situations is coming from sociological studies, although these also
tend to abstract from the texts in the direction of a modern
academic discipline.
In sum, experience in our world tends to hide from exegetes the
fact that Paul's letters were not `doing theology'. Mainstream
historical-critical exegesis with its inherited understanding of them
as theology shows a strong tendency to treat them as networks of
concepts, and to abstract general theology from his pastoral
speech. The criterion of intelligibility has not been rejected. It has
simply not been considered. Now that we have proposed it, we
submit that it imposes itself. The primary characteristic of a letter is
that it is communication. We say that Paul's letters were substitutes
for his presence, and even opponents said that they were bareiai
kai i! sxyrai (2 Cor. 10.10). The criterion of intelligibility could be
rejected only if it proved inapplicable in practice, if it were clear
222
that Paul's letters will not make sense if we assume that they could
be followed by listeners, without extensive exegesis. Our teleological
reading may not command acceptance in every detail, but it has
shown that Romans will make sense as communication, very
powerful sense.
The criterion of intelligibility will exclude certain readings of
what Paul said, but it does not mean that we reject all the
theological wealth found by exegetes before us. The separation
between teleological and causal reading allows the criterion of
intelligibility to operate, and has the complementary advantage
that we need no longer try to make the text `say' all that we can
learn from it. The separate causal reading allows us to acknowledge
that in it we are studying this text in the context of the whole
corpus for the sake of an understanding of Paul's thought. We
recognize that he was not intending to give an account of his
thought, but because his pastoral work was rooted in the gospel it
gives us access to a great deal of his thought. This is a development
from the mainstream approach to taking the letters seriously as
letters and pastoral. There it is done by perceiving the material
essentially as occasional rather than systematic theology.
Perceptions of the creation theology in Rom. 1.164.25 offer an
example of the unnecessary constriction which arises from treating,
What was Paul saying to the Romans? and What does this text
mean? as two forms of the one question. Our study in chapter 12
shows the Creatorcreature relationship as dening the nature of
sin and of salvation, thus shaping the theology of justication. This
theological insight is not new. It appears in various forms in
scholarly study of Romans and of Paul's thought. Kasemann, for
instance, expounds the newness of the gospel in this passage in
terms of the extension of God's covenant faithfulness to faithfulness to the whole creation. We saw in chapter 11 how this distorts
the text so that it cannot meet the criterion of intelligibility. The
appropriate response is not to say that Kasemann is wrong. This
insight is very important. It is to say that Kasemann's rich
encounter with the text demonstrates the inadequacy of the traditional pattern of exegesis. Within that pattern, Barrett's treatment
of the Creatorcreature relationship is truer to the text as letter.9
Similarly, we argued in the causal exposition that the sin of
which the sinners are guilty and that holds them in bondage is the
9
223
sin of Adam. Hooker's earlier proposal that Paul was talking about
Adam in Rom. 1.1832 aroused interest but did not become
established in mainstream exegesis, at least partly because of the
difculty of arguing that as `the meaning of the text'.10
Accountability to NT scholarship
We have argued that a new historical-critical approach to Paul's
letters is needed, developed it, shown it yielding helpful results with
a key passage, and argued that its special features open up the texts
to us in a new way. The study of Rom. 1.164.25 is recognizably
part of the current debate on Romans, but methodological changes
so fundamental and extensive create a difculty for accountability.
Any academic discipline is a communal enterprise. Scholars expect
to be accountable to the scholarly community. In NT exegesis the
normal form of this accountability is participation in the continuing
debate on its terms. We questioned elements of the mainstream
debate which are accepted presuppositions and therefore not
discussed. This led us to formulate new key questions. As a result,
neither our teleological nor our causal reading can be presented as
a running engagement with other readings. It is vital that this
should not be attempted, since its effect is to pull the detail of the
two-step exegesis back into the framework of the mainstream
debate, choking off the new enterprise before it has been considered
on its own terms. Of course, this comparative isolation is not
characteristic of the two-step method of exegesis. It is an inevitable
feature of this rst experiment with it.
We noted that changes in exegetical practice take place in
continuity and discontinuity with the dominant patterns of their
times. To present a new approach, one must concentrate on the
new elements, thus emphasizing the discontinuity. This study nevertheless arises from the ongoing debate and I am very much
beholden to it. The informed reader will have noticed strong
elements of continuity. Some of these have already been mentioned.
A few more examples may point up the continuity more clearly.
We argued that the issue in Rom. 1.183.20 is God's righteousness as judge. Paul was discussing it not as a question on a
philosophical-theological agenda but as a problem believers faced
with the gospel of justication for all believers without reference to
10
Àdam in Romans 1'.
224
their membership or non-membership in Israel. This reading overcomes the problems the passage poses when Paul is assumed to be
trying to convince The Reader that all have sinned and therefore
need grace. It allows us to see that sin is a datum in the passage, not
in any sense the goal of the argument.
Barrett in his 1957 commentary explicates this passage, with a
pre-Sanders view of the law, as demonstrating the human predicament of sinfulness and the misguidedness of any view that the law
enables human beings to escape that predicament. He faces all the
problems this poses. On the other hand, his exegesis is on the basis
that `before salvation can be completed, righteousness must be
manifested. God, the righteous judge, must do righteous judgement
in his court; and, in this court, man must secure the verdict,
Righteous.'11 Accordingly, when he concludes his discussion at
Rom. 3.20, he describes the human predicament not in terms of
human sin but in terms of the way God's righteousness as judge is
manifested: Às long, therefore, as God's righteousness is manifested and understood in terms of the law it must spell wrath. The
only hope for man is that God should nd some other means,
beyond law and religion, of manifesting his righteousness.'12
It will be obvious that we share Barrett's view that Paul was
talking about the eschatological verdict. It is also clear that our
view that Rom. 1.183.20 is focussed on God's judgement rather
than on human sin is a development from Barrett's position. This
results from two major factors, Sanders' presentation of the role of
the law in rst-century Judaism, which has been a major factor in
the continuing debate, and the new method of historical-critical
exegesis, which sets the text in a different light.
Our whole exegesis clearly rests on assumptions about the
apocalyptic framework of Paul's discussions and about the way
righteousness is to be understood on the basis of Jewish tradition.
These are a set of presuppositions widely accepted in the debate,
and we have accepted them even while we were questioning major
methodological presuppositions. If we had taken a more Bultmannian view of the relationship between Paul and the Hellenistic
world, for instance, the language would have appeared to be
functioning somewhat differently.
Another example of continuity is provided by Dunn's assessment
11
12

Ibid., 71.
225
that Paul wanted to free promise and law from ethnic constraints
for the benet of a wider range of recipients.13 This is a good
analytic comment on Paul's pastoral work as it appears in the
teleological reading. As an interpretation of what Paul was intending to do, it tends to impose a presupposition that he was
writing theology. Dunn shows him doing it polemically. We saw
Paul drawing on his theology for pastoral speech. Here the
continuity is clear, and the discontinuity is created methodologically, by the new view of Paul's purpose and the nature of the text
he created in fullling it.
The reader will be able to call to mind other examples of this
kind of continuity. Always it comes together with discontinuity.
Problems are redened or disappear, and new questions arise.
Accordingly, answerability to the current debate takes the form of
very careful presentation of the general issues, explicit spelling out
of questions, and very detailed accounting to Paul's text for the
readings. In this context, two issues need further discussion: the
testing of the readings offered and the discussion in chapter 2 of the
danger of making Paul in our own image.
In chapter 11, we tested our teleological reading extensively
before accepting it as a reasonable account of what Paul was
hoping the Romans would hear when Rom. 1.164.25 was read to
them. Only then did we use it as the frame of reference for the
causal reading. Such testing does not appear in the mainstream
debate. In practice, it is replaced by the exegete's decision to
publish or not publish ideas, and by the processes of the debate.
For the causal reading, no battery of tests is applicable. In this
limited study their control function has been largely replaced by the
discipline of working on Paul's thought in the framework of the
teleological reading. In a full causal reading, we should also have
the disciplines of working within the context of the whole corpus.
In a full debate with two-step readings, the normal processes of
academic debate would be established as well.
In chapter 3, it was asserted that most Pauline studies show Paul
as a scholar writing for other scholars. He is seen as making the
best possible argument, and seeking an assessment that his argument was good enough to establish his conclusion. Any action he
hoped for would ow from that intellectual response. At that stage,
only a series of apparently trivial examples could be adduced as
13
Romans, lxxi.
226
evidence. The exegesis of Rom. 1.164.25 has shown the meaning

and ground of this assertion, making it more open to assessment. It
is revealed as a positive statement of the negatively stated claim
that mainstream historical-critical study fails to take with full
seriousness its own dictum that Paul's letters are letters and pastoral
and must be treated as such. We made two important moves in
treating them as letters. In chapter 8, we started from our knowledge of ancient letters and asked how this should affect our
reading. Usually, scholars assume that Romans contains a long
treatise section and seek a category of letter to accommodate this.
The other move was to make the purpose question truly teleological, forcing a closer study of the addressees as Paul saw them.
These moves also helped us to see the letter as the work of a pastor
in action. One other move has been critical to this. We worked on
the assumption that Paul was speaking with authority as pastor
and apostle, not with some deference or difdence as apologist. In
doing this, we were taking Paul at his word.
Making Paul in our own image as scholar rather than allowing
the text its full pastoral impact is partly a result of underlying
questions. The key question that makes Paul in the image of a
scholar is, Against whom or what is Paul arguing? This is a key
question of Pauline scholarship.
The key question that allows Paul to emerge as a pastor is, To
whom was he speaking and what response was he seeking? This
question will not reveal a pastor if it is asked about a text in which
a scholar is trying to defeat opponents' arguments. It may be
objected that The Apostle's address to The Conservative in our
teleological reading is directed against the presuppositions inhibiting his relationship with Gentile believers. This is true, but by
itself it would constitute an inadequate and distorting account of
The Apostle's purpose and approach, which are positive, not
negative.
One cannot understand Paul's arguments without identifying his
problems, and these were often caused by opponents who were
putting conicting points of view, even attacking Paul's preaching
and teaching. The àgainst' question must be asked, but it must
always be subordinated to the true purpose question of teleological
reading. Otherwise, it imposes a presupposition that makes it
unlikely, if not impossible, that Paul will appear as pastor in the
way he does in our teleological reading.
Again, it may be objected that we have avoided making Paul in
227
our own image as scholar only to make him in our own image as
pastor. First-century Mediterranean pastors did not use twentiethcentury Western psychology, and surely that is the source of a term
like à disjunction in his self-perception', which we used in describing The Apostle's approach to The Conservative.14 This objection invites several comments.
First, we observed that Paul did bring to light and strip away
some assumptions that underpinned The Conservative's self-perception. We did not speculate on whether he thought of the process
in the way a modern Western psychologically trained pastor might
think of it. Paul raised issues such as the impartiality of God's
judgement and the special gift of the Torah to Israel, and showed
that they had been misunderstood. On the other hand, he did say
sy ! Ioydaioq e!ponomazBh kai e!panapayBh nomCv kai kayxasai e!n ueCv
(Rom. 2.17) and ti oy(n to perisson toy ! Ioydaioy; (Rom. 3.1a). It
is difcult for twentieth-century Western listeners-in to get a grasp
on these as address without using some such term as `self-perception', even though we know that our understanding of a `self ' is
different from Paul's and the Romans'. There is truth, then, in the
suggestion that we have made Paul in our own image as pastor, but
we have been aware of the question and taken care of the way this
affects our reading. Thus, for instance, the full phrase about the
Conservative's self-perception is `something that we can perceive as
a disjunction in his self-perception'.15 The explication of this is
related to clear textual evidence. It is therefore far less insidious
than the unconscious making of Paul in the scholarly image that
leads Conzelmann to talk about addressing the reader with surprising directness or Kelber to consider the signicance of Paul's
preference for letter as a literary form.16
Second, the admiration that the Fathers or Luther, for instance,
sometimes express for Paul's pastoral awareness and approach
nds little echo in modern commentaries. This contrast is pointed
up by the agenda that Best nds relevant in his study of Paul as
pastor.17 Thus, a modern reader is particularly likely to perceive a
concern with Paul as pastor as a peculiarity of the exegete.
Third, and most important, the question of the way in which and
the extent to which we make Paul in our own image is a form of the
14
15
16
17
Above, p. 123.
Above, p. 123.
Above, pp. 323.
Paul and his Converts.
228
hermeneutical question of the role of the reader in meaning. We

noted in chapter 1 that we now have different ways of conceiving of
the meaning of a text. Is it contained in the text as what the author
wanted to say? Does it inhere in the structures of the text, more or
less independently of the writer's intention? Does it arise in the
encounter between the reader and the text? We argued that in
practice the model of meaning which is applicable depends on the
nature of the text we are reading and what we want to do with it.
We have acknowledged that Romans is a letter written as part of
Paul's ministry and that we want to attend to it as his. This requires
the model of meaning as contained in the text and in some sense
governed by the author's intention. (It does not, of course, involve
a judgement that the use of other models of meaning could not also
be valid, for purposes to which they might be appropriate. That is a
separate question.)
Our view of the text here and our goal for this exegesis preclude
the use of the model of meaning as arising in the encounter between
reader and text. It does not, however, negate the truths of that
model. Without a reader, a writer's text is for ever locked up in
silence. Only a reader can make it `speak', and the reader must
necessarily contribute to what she `hears' it `say'. Meaning cannot
be sought in a letter like this as if it were a chemical compound
which will be found to have the same composition whoever performs the analysis. No exegete, therefore, can avoid making Paul in
her own image to some extent. That is one of the reasons why the
continuing debate is necessary. It also means that we should be
aware of what we are doing. For this, the work in this book has
two advantages. First, we have been forced to ask questions that
are not usually made explicit and that focus attention on ourselves
as exegetes: What do we want to achieve? What kind of text do we
think we are reading? How should that shape our approach to it?
Second, good use of historical-critical principles relates us to the
text in such a way that we are as open as possible to be challenged
by it. The two-step method frees us from trying to do too many
things at once, reducing the temptation to draw Paul into our
concerns before we have attended to him in his own terms.
The church and the Bible
We began this study from two concerns, the Christian concern with
the church's alienation from the Bible and the scholarly concern
229
with respecting the nature of Paul's texts. The two quickly converged, and we have been working within the eld of scholarship,
focussing on the implications of the scholarly concern. It seems
appropriate to ask, by way of epilogue, whether the results offer
any small contribution to the massive issues of the church's
relationship with the Bible. Some readers may question whether
they are not counter-productive. The two-step method has led us to
a reading of what Paul was saying in Rom. 1.164.25 which might
well seem to widen the culture gap and sharpen the sense of
alienation. If so, are we being driven harder towards the apparently
ahistorical alternatives that are being pioneered?
This work is being done in pursuit of truth, not of immediate
relevance. It must be observed, however, that two people have used
the method in church study programmes at various levels and
found that participants were delighted to come to grips with texts,
often for the rst time. Working ministers, some very highly
qualied academically and some not, found the study of Rom.
1.164.25 opening up agendas that were urgent for them. Notable
examples were pastoral problems with people who cannot accept
forgiveness and the issues of the relationship between the gospel
and the various cultures in which it comes to living expression.
These outcomes were not simply products of the two-step method,
but they show that far from having the alienating effect that might
be feared, it can offer new access to Paul's apostolic testimony. This
is partly because the unabashed acceptance of the particularity of
the texts allows their humanity to shine through. The Bible
participates in the particularity of the incarnation.
We noted the importance of the breakdown of the question What
does this text mean? In this study, we have been attending to the
text as Paul's, from the church's viewpoint, as apostolic testimony.
This involves accepting for this task the model of meaning as
contained in the text and in some sense governed by the author's
intention. This enterprise is critical because the gospel is rooted in
God's action in a particular time and place, and the story is given
to us by the witnesses. Without the historical study, we risk slipping
away into solipsism, and creating a revitalized Gnosticism. On the
other hand, this is the rst step in the church's encounter with the
text. Our work does not address the question of whether, and if so
how, other models of meaning should also be used. They are in use,
and if the scripture is to be appropriated in the church's life, and if
the church is to indwell the biblical story, it seems that is a proper
230
pattern, in principle. It is part of the church's continuing task to

examine the ways in which other models should be taken up. This
involves major hermeneutical and theological questions about the
roles of different kinds of readings and the relationships between
them, in the church and in the various theological disciplines.
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I N D E X OF B I B L I C A L A N D O T H E R A N C I E N T
SOURCES
Biblical
Genesis
1.206
4.2b16
6.15
11.19
12.3
15.5
15.6
15.7
15.1821
17.46
17.8
18.3
22.17
22.18
26.5
194
194
194
194
163
159, 197, 199
156, 157, 158, 160, 199,
214
163
163
159
163
167
159
163
157
Leviticus
19.15
26.41
120
132
Deuteronomy
1.1617
10.16
30.6
120
132
132
2 Kings
17.15
127
Psalms
31.12a
51.4
62.12
72.14
84.7
94.11
98.9
106.20
158
120, 137
129
120
121
127
120
127
Proverbs
24.12
129
Isaiah
52.5
132
Jeremiah
2.11
4.4
9.2
9.245
127
132
121
132
Ezekiel
36.20
132
Daniel
7
123
Amos
1.33.2
129
Matthew
23.136
135
John
1.15
165
Acts
15.21
17.31
18.8
20.712
21.1724
131
55
69
100
178
Romans
14
18
111
1.1
89, 96, 97
89
7, 10, 21
67, 103, 104
249
250
Romans (cont.)
1.17
1.116a
1.117
1.3
1.56
1.7
1.8
1.813
1.815
1.1113
1.1114
1.1115
1.12
1.14
1.1415
1.15
1.16
1.16a
1.16b
1.1617
1.1618
1.163.26
1.164.25
1.165.11
1.168.39
1.17
1.17a
1.17b
1.17c
1.18
1.18b
1.1832
1.183.20
64, 67
115
66
168
65, 103, 104
67
64
71
67
65
122
103
103
201
65
106, 122
61, 122, 129, 191, 198
107, 116
50, 73, 116, 209
6, 8, 12, 23, 29, 47, 62,
67, 74, 94, 95, 107, 111,
116, 118, 122, 126, 129,
141, 145, 150, 189, 209
10, 122
112, 196, 200
1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 15, 18,
20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 30, 33,
34, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 47,
48, 51, 58, 60, 61, 63, 64,
65, 66, 67, 73, 74, 76, 96,
105, 107, 108, 109, 110,
115, 136, 161, 169, 171,
178, 182, 184, 185, 188,
190, 192, 198, 199, 200,
201, 203, 205, 206, 208,
210, 212, 213, 221, 222,
223, 225, 226, 229
173
66
64, 73, 82, 186, 192, 198
116, 126, 191
121
116, 122
50, 51, 52, 122, 136, 193,
194, 201
126
9, 11, 50, 52, 54, 105,
125, 127, 130, 131, 193,
194, 223
6, 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17,
24, 25, 26, 47, 48, 49,
51, 54, 56, 58, 59, 60,
61, 62, 111, 112, 113,
1.183.26
1.183.31
1.184.15
1.184.25
1.185.21
1.19
1.1920
1.1921
1.1921a
1.1932
1.193.20
1.20
1.20b
1.21
1.21a
1.21b
1.213
1.21b2
1.21b3
1.223
1.23
1.245
1.24, 26, 28
1.248
1.2432
1.242.11
1.25
1.267
1.2831
1.29
1.301
1.32
1.32a
2
24
2.1
2.1a
2.12
2.13
2.15
2.111
2.116
2.129
2.410
2.5
2.511
2.6
2.610
2.611
2.7
2.710
124, 172, 189, 202, 203,

223, 224
189
8
7
122
7
52, 195
127
127, 195, 197, 198
126
145
10
128, 195
52, 126, 128
52, 193, 195
128
52
192
126, 127
52, 196
126
52, 98, 127, 193, 194, 201
52
126
196
194
146
52
52
52
50
127
53, 126, 127, 128, 192
53, 54, 125, 126, 146,
196
11, 43, 106, 172
98
50, 53, 106, 128, 129
128
191
52, 53
6, 105
43, 54, 125, 128, 129
82, 106
143
153
106, 131
53, 120
129
192
106
204
134

2.8
2.89
2.810
2.9
2.910
2.10
2.11
2.12
2.12b
2.1213
2.1229
2.123.20
2.13
2.14
2.1416
2.15
2.1516
2.16
2.17
2.1720
2.1724
204
129
139
129, 201
49
129, 201
129
11, 131, 135, 201
132
49, 204
61, 130, 133, 135
125, 159, 204
131, 133, 196
12, 60, 131, 133, 134
131, 133
133
131
131, 132
227
54, 131, 135, 156, 161
52, 53, 54, 102, 105, 106,
134, 153, 204
2.1729
106
2.174.22/23 107
2.212
134, 135
2.213
132
2.23
134
2.234
135, 204
2.24
132
2.25a
132
2.25b
132
2.257
106
2.259
54, 58
2.26
60, 132
2.267
12, 133
2.27
60, 132
2.289
132, 133
2.29
132, 136
38
82
3.1
58, 98, 106, 137
3.1a
227
3.18
58, 59, 106, 112, 136,
139, 140, 143, 154, 172
3.2
50, 98, 137, 139
3.3
50, 137
3.3a
137
3.3b
137
3.34
198
3.4
50, 51, 1378, 13940,
180, 196
3.45
120
3.5
138, 165, 178
3.56
141, 201
3.6
138
3.7
3.7b
3.78
3.8
3.9
3.9a
3.9b
3.920
3.1020
3.10b12
3.18
3.19
3.19b
3.1920
3.20
3.20a
3.20b
3.21
3.212
3.212c
3.216
3.218
3.2131
3.22
3.22a
3.22c
3.22d
3.223
3.22c23
3.22d23
3.22d24a
3.23
3.23a
3.234
3.234a
3.235a
3.236
3.24
3.24a
3.24b
3.246
3.24b25a
3.25
3.25a
3.25b
251
138, 192
140
58, 69, 138, 174
138, 140, 143, 144
49, 54, 98, 142, 192, 195
6, 140, 1424
52, 141, 143, 144, 196
9, 11, 140, 142, 201
52, 54
49
49
11, 54, 58, 60, 111, 141,
179
146, 192, 201, 204
49, 61, 111, 201
12, 54, 111, 153, 196,
204, 205, 224
50, 141, 204
141, 204
61
56, 59, 60, 62
13
6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15,
17, 18, 24, 25, 27, 47, 49,
56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62,
112, 125, 144, 147, 148,
149, 154, 162, 172, 188,
189, 218
156, 158
9, 18
14, 49, 56, 58, 59 144,
148, 149
56
11, 15, 188, 198
15, 18, 49, 56, 188
50, 51, 113
9
13
14, 25, 58, 59, 145
9, 11, 15, 48, 49, 56, 150,
193, 195, 201
18, 49
17
14, 18, 188, 192, 202
190
18, 56, 58, 198
14, 48, 196
13, 27, 56, 145, 151
151, 196
91, 150, 178, 198
14, 55, 145, 201
56, 58, 151
6, 13, 151, 196 197, 199
152
252
Romans (cont.)
3.25b26
151
3.25b26a 146
3.26
13, 59, 113, 147, 148,
149, 151, 196, 200, 201
3.26b
57
3.27
9, 81, 153, 161
3.27a
156
3.278
156, 162
3.2730
10
3.2731
6, 9, 61
3.274.2
106
3.274.25
18, 24, 47, 50, 61, 113,
125, 153, 161, 168, 189,
190, 203
3.27b28
156
3.28
32, 196
3.2930
50, 73
3.30
196
3.304.25
10
3.31
81
3.31a
154, 156, 158, 167
3.31b
155, 156, 167
3.314.3
162
4
6, 8, 25, 43, 73, 106, 107,
148, 169, 197, 214, 218
4.1
6, 155, 158, 1649
4.15.21
8
4.18.39
8
4.2
162, 165, 196
4.2a
156
4.2b
156
4.23
156
4.3
81, 197
4.3a
156
4.3b
156
4.4
157
4.5
158, 167, 196, 197, 198
4.68
158
4.9a
158
4.9b
158
4.912
133, 167
4.10
87, 158
4.10a
158
4.10b11a 158
4.11b12
158
4.12
169
4.13
159, 163, 169
4.1316
50, 61
4.1317
163
4.1318
161
4.14
159
4.15a
159
4.15b
159
4.16
4.16a
4.16b
4.17a
4.17b
4.18
4.1821
4.18a
4.19
4.20
4.202
4.20b21
4.22
4.2324a
4.2325
4.2425
4.24b25
4.25
4.25b
5
58
511
5.1
5.111
5.2
5.9
5.11
5.12d
5.1214
5.1221
5.128.39
5.18b
5.20
5.21
6.1
6.12
6.111
6.17.6
6.210
6.311
6.1011
6.11
6.1213
6.1223
6.14
6.15
6.1523
6.17
7
7.1
7.16
7.4
7.78.17
148, 16970, 197

159
61
159, 170
159, 197
159
197
197
160, 197
1923, 201
193
160
160
160
106, 163
199
160
8, 160, 191
93
7
66, 173
64
106, 192, 198
66, 73, 173, 175, 191,
192, 193
193
150, 192
8, 191
174
127, 195
66, 174
173
93
174
8
81
36
36, 39, 40, 41, 87, 182, 188
174
174
188
36
174
174
65
174
66
174
71, 103
66
105
174
105
174

7.1325
7.25
8.18
8.117
8.4
8.5
8.911
8.12
8.1217
8.13
8.1739
8.1839
8.31
8.31a
8.319
911
9.15
9.16
9.111.36
9.3
9.5
9.618
9.19
9.1929
9.20
9.3010.21
10.1
10.3
10.1617
11.110
11.4
11.1124
11.13
11.1322
11.1324
11.1724
11.19
11.2532
11.336
1213
12.1
12.12
12.113.14
12.115.6
13.810
13.1114
1415
14.112
14.115.6
14.115.7
14.23
15.713
15.813
15.14
175
175
175
66
168
168
175
105
175
168
175
66, 73
165
165
87
66, 67, 89, 173, 175
175
176
173
165, 168
168
176
165
176
165
148, 176
105
178
218
176
156
176
100
102
118
65
165
176
176
66
105
177
73
65, 173, 176
177
133, 177
21
178
66, 177
103
7
66, 72, 100, 173, 177
87
71, 105
15.1415
15.1416
15.1421
15.1416.27
15.1516
15.223
15.224
15.24
15.30
15.301
15.302
16
16.12
16.34
16.315
16.17
16.22
65, 103
103
65
64
64, 68, 73, 104
103
65
65
105
69
65
64, 100
65
103
72, 94
105
77
1 Corinthians
1.1
1.49
1.14
1.1831
1.26
1.30
3.16
5.10
5.1012
8
10.18
12.17
15
15.35
15.15
15.21
15.212
15.22
16.12
32
71
69
178
168
179
32
142, 144
142
178
168
218
55
55
166
195
127
195
142
2 Corinthians
1.37
1.17
5.16
5.21
10.2
10.3
10.10
11.18
71
168
168
179
168
168
221
168
Galatians
1.17
1.45
2.1114
2.1415
68
71
68
100
253
254
Galatians (cont.)
2.15
123, 218
2.154.7
148
2.164.7
178
2.17
166
2.20
218
3
43, 218
3.1
219
3.14.11
42, 219
3.2
81, 218
3.2a
219
3.25
219
3.5
218, 220
3.64.7
163
3.1014
16
3.11
218
3.15
218
3.22
218
3.26
218
4.23
168
4.29
168
4.30
156
5.3
133
Philippians
1.37
2.48
3
3.211
3.3
3.9
71
178
178
148
169
179
Colossians
2.11
4.16
169
77
1 Thessalonians
1.210
1.9b10
2.13
5.27
71
55
218
77
Philemon
12
47
77
71
Hebrews
9.5
150
2 Peter
3.16
16, 17
Revelation
1.3
78
Apocrypha and
pseudepigrapha
Apocalypse of Moses
xxxxi
193
2 Baruch
44.1215
44.1315
48.8
51.3
54.19b
54.21
57.13
59.2
120
164
159
164
127
120
164
164
1 Enoch
38
1023
120
120
4 Ezra
3.216
7.335
7.48 [118]
7.119
127
120
127
164
Joseph and Aseneth

8.9
159
Jubilees
1.23
21.4
22.14
23.10a
32.19
132
120
164
157
164
1 Maccabees
2.52
157, 168
Psalms of Solomon
9.45
120
Sibylline Oracles
III.845
128
Sirach, Wisdom of Jesus ben
16.14
129
44.19
168
44.19a
159
44.1921
157
44.20
168
44.21b
164

Wisdom of Solomon
12.1222
120
13.19
128
1314
193
15
127
Other ancient literature

Athanasius
`De Incarnatione' 25 40
Augustine
De Spir. et Litt. XI.18 121
Cicero
De Oratore
I.33.1502 84
I.60.257 84
II.22.96
84
III.5660 86
Dead Sea Scrolls
1QH IV, 335 130
Diognetus, Epistle to
IX.1
142
Epictetus
Discourses
II.9.27 139
II.12.513 139
II.23.16
105
II.24.110 139
Encheiridion 1.5 142
Eusebius
Ecclesiastical History III.39.34 84
Heraclitus
Epistle to Hermodorus 1345
Justin Martyr
Dialogue with Trypho 185
Midrash Rabbah
Gen Rab XI.2 193
Gen Rab XII.6 193
Ex Rab XIX.4 132
Philo
Conf. 163
135
Mig. 92
132
Spec. Leg. I.3045 132
IV.187 159
Quintilian
Institutes of Oratory
I.11
78
II.12.10
86
II.17.56 88
IX.2.2932 106
XII.10.4955 84
Seneca
Letters to Lucilius
66.14, 18, 38 105
66.40
105
Suetonius
De Vita Caesarum 25.4 70
Talmud
b Abod Zar 22b 127
b Sabb 146a 127
b Yebam 103b 127
255
G E N E R A L I N D EX
Accounting for all of the text, 36, 38,

423, 45, 47, 63, 1078, 171
All, see Paq
Apostle, The, see personae in the text
Audience, 21, 2830, 556, 58, 60,
6972, 78, 96107, 110, 114, 1202,
1224, 21214
Authorial intention, 45, 3542, 44, 63,
7980, 21011, 2278, 22930; see
also meaning in texts
Basic conception, the, 67, 10, 1518,
20, 10910, 2089, 22930
Causal exposition, causal explanation,
22, 247, 2930, 34, 423, 44,
1824, 185, 2067, 21112, 222
Coherence, criteria of, 423, 21112,
214
Congregation, The, see personae in the
text
Conservative, The, see personae in the
text
Creatorcreature relationship, 26,
1925, 1968, 2023, 2056,
2223
Faith, 235, 30, 4950, 73, 11617,
11819, 1212, 124, 1446, 1489,
153, 154, 15561, 163, 186, 189,
191, 1968, 1989, 21721
God's righteousness, 10, 1315, 1718,
224, 57, 62, 73, 74, 945, 1012,
11112, 113, 11618, 11922,
1246, 127, 136, 1378, 141, 1448,
14950, 1523, 172, 1789, 1867,
189, 191, 1968, 199200, 208,
2234
Grammatical problems of Rom.
3.216, 1415, 49, 567, 112, 1478,
172
256
Historical-critical exegesis, scholarship,

34, 5, 279, 345, 7980, 91, 179,
182, 185, 207, 20923, 223
Intelligibility, criterion of, 956, 114,
21522
Justication account, justication
framework, 67, 1618, 20, 22, 24,
29, 445, 1834, 185, 2089
Justication theology, Paul's, 1819,
26, 33, 38, 182, 1834, 18591,
1968, 2003, 205, 206, 2089;
see also basic conception, causal
exposition
Law, 7, 89, 10, 12, 61, 66, 689, 110,
1245, 1303, 1356, 1401, 144,
1535, 1569, 162, 1735, 186, 196,
2035, 206
Letter, see under nature of the text
Meaning in texts, 28, 301, 3440, 45,
46, 1078, 109, 114, 115, 171,
1845, 21011; see also authorial
intention
Nature of the text, the
exegetical question, the, 20, 33, 445,
634, 76, 1078, 21012
letter, 1, 3, 4, 5, 21, 323, 34, 40, 41,
64, 769, 215
oral-aural, 78, 8190, 956, 114,
1367, 215
pastoral, 1, 3, 4, 5, 224, 27, 29, 30,
645, 712, 74, 139, 161, 17781,
183, 211, 2245; see also nature of
the text: preaching
preaching, 224, 30, 67, 734, 906,
1023, 11011, 1212, 133, 139,
1727, 17981, 1823, 208,
21314
General index
257
theological exposition, 202, 30, 33,

44, 48, 64, 66, 712, 76, 78, 91, 92,
945, 102, 10910, 153
Oral-aural, see under nature of the text
Rom. 3.216, grammatical problems,

see grammatical problems of
Rom. 3.216
Paq, 4851, 60, 91, 111, 11213, 2002,

213
Pastoral, see under nature of the text
Personae in the text, 1037, 114, 11516,
1224, 21112, 21213
Preaching, see under nature of the text
Purpose, 212, 29, 33, 45, 61, 62, 634,
723, 745, 94, 110, 21113, 215;
see also teleological exposition,
authorial intention
Teleological exposition, teleological

explanation, 22, 234, 2930, 34,
412, 445, 623, 76, 79, 109,
11314, 171, 182, 184, 1856, 207,
21115, 222
Theological exposition, see under nature
of the text
Thought, Paul's, 22, 23, 289, 33, 34,
36, 423, 80, 1823, 184, 185,
2012, 211, 21617; see also
coherence, criteria of, basic
conception
Torah, see law
Questions, exegetical, 45, 19, 22, 278,

301, 345, 623, 21014

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SOCIETY FOR NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES

Purpose and Cause in

Asking new exegetical questions

Exegesis of Romans 1.164.25: the basic conception

Romans 1.164.25: what do we want to know?

The basis for separating presuppositions from

How to trace what Paul was intending to say to

Working from the problems of interpretation within

Paul's purpose in creating the text

The nature of the text

Hypothesis describing Romans 1.164.25

The teleological exposition of Romans 1.164.25

Testing the teleological reading

The causal exposition of Romans 1.164.25

Review and conclusion

This book is one outcome of many years' work, and it is a joy

R. E. Brown et al. (eds.), The Jerome Biblical

The work reported in this study of Rom. 1.164.25 springs from

Uniting Church in Australia, Basis of Union, par. 5.

Purpose and cause in Pauline exegesis

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 99.

Asking new exegetical questions

Word of God on whom man's salvation depends is to be heard and

With Stendahl, Final Account, 21.

Purpose and cause in Pauline exegesis

This study examines Rom. 1.164.25. It is a scholarly study,

Asking new exegetical questions

manuals makes this obvious. If we nd some Sumerian prayers, we

Working in mainstream NT scholarship, we approach texts with

The basic conception and its problems

The Obedience of Faith, chs. 2 and, esp., 3.

Purpose and cause in Pauline exegesis

presentation of God's saving righteousness to faith, and Rom.

Romans, viiviii, 38.

The basic conception and its problems

Purpose and cause in Pauline exegesis

Neither Dunn nor Ziesler has explicitly questioned the basic

The basic conception and its problems

The rst is between the goal of the argument in Rom. 1.183.20

Purpose and cause in Pauline exegesis

The second major difculty with the content of the argument is

e.g. K. Barth, A Shorter Commentary on Romans, 357.

The basic conception and its problems

expounding at length the nature and implications of faith and the

Purpose and cause in Pauline exegesis

of the Atonement on which it all depends takes nineteen words,

e.g. Craneld, Romans, I, 21112.

The basic conception and its problems

(verse 23). If Paul meant to give a justication account, his meaning

Purpose and cause in Pauline exegesis

account has fundamental weaknesses or we are mistaken in

Palestinian Judaism, 443, 499.

The basic conception and its problems

Purpose and cause in Pauline exegesis

taking account of recent work on the law have highlighted in Rom.

The basic conception and its problems

we need to develop is that Paul was talking about something else,

To test the hypothesis that Rom. 1.164.25 may be something

What do we want to know?

What do we mean by `theological exposition'? This will become

Paul the Apostle, 77.

Purpose and cause in Pauline exegesis